Introduction: Lord Fink

Stanley Fink, Esquire, having been created Baron Fink, of Northwood in the County of Middlesex, was introduced and took the oath, supported by Lord Harris of Peckham and Lord Howard of Lympne, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Introduction: Lord Stoneham of Droxford

Benjamin Russell Mackintosh Stoneham, Esquire, having been created Baron Stoneham of Droxford, of Meon Valley in the County of Hampshire, was introduced and took the oath, supported by Lord Rennard and Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Introduction: Baroness Berridge

Elizabeth Rose Berridge, having been created Baroness Berridge, of The Vale of Catmose in the County of Rutland, was introduced and took the oath, supported by Lord McColl of Dulwich and Baroness Morris of Bolton, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Gaza
	 — 
	Question

Lord Fowler: To ask Her Majesty's Government what representations they have made to the Government of Israel on import restrictions affecting Gaza.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, we are clear that the status quo in Gaza is both a tragedy and unsustainable. We continue to call on Israel to ease restrictions on access to Gaza. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary raised the issue with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visited Israel in November. My ministerial colleague, Alistair Burt, is currently in the region and discussed Gaza at length with the Israeli Co-ordinator for Government Activity in the Territories, General Dangot.

Lord Fowler: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. Is not the real problem the restrictions on the import of building materials, which are necessary to build and rebuild houses, schools and medical facilities in Gaza? We all utterly deplore the acts of terrorism directed at Israel but do not restrictions of that kind, affecting thousands of ordinary people in Gaza, gather in support for extremism rather than cutting it off?

Lord Howell of Guildford: Yes, my noble friend is completely right. The problem is obviously the lifting and easing of the blockade. We have had some small success: the Israeli authorities have agreed to shift from a total block on progress to a list of very limited permitted goods and are moving to a blacklist of goods that cannot go in. They have announced that they now are happy to allow in things such as steel-ready concrete, asphalt and cement for Palestinian Authority-approved civilian projects that are under the supervision of the UN.
	There is, of course, a long list of ifs and buts. Frankly, we have not found that any of this so-called easement has yet made much difference on the ground but it is a slight move forward. Of course, consumer goods are allowed in. We will continue to press extremely hard to get a much more expansive and open regime to allow in the reconstruction items and materials to which my noble friend refers.

Lord Clinton-Davis: Opposed as I am to Netanyahu, is it not right to recognise that in recent days there has been a considerable relaxation over the movement of construction goods from Israel to Gaza? Is it not also right to recognise that there is currently recognition by the United Nations that Hamas is not exactly performing well? Does it not altogether oppose the United Nations regime?

Lord Howell of Guildford: I say to the noble Lord that no one on any side is really performing fully in the way that we want. The relaxation has been announced and we are watching to see whether it has an impact on the ground, although, as I said earlier to my noble friend, our analysis suggests that that impact is not very great so far. However, it is at least a step in the right direction, although we have to go further, as there are so many qualifications and safeguards. I also say to the noble Lord-and it is a perfectly fair point with which I know he will agree-that rockets are raining down all the time on Israeli territory from Gaza. Therefore, the Israeli authorities have to have some safeguards with regard to equipment going into Gaza, which might be used merely to develop aggressive military weaponry for use against them. There is a balance to be struck, and I think that sensible people all round have to recognise both the difficulties and the possibilities on all sides.

Lord Dykes: Is my noble friend hopeful of a resumption in negotiations between the immediate parties as soon as possible, despite the enormous difficulties that that would involve? Such a resumption would help to end the prolonged collective oppression of the long-suffering Gazan population.

Lord Howell of Guildford: I live in hope, otherwise I would not be doing what I am doing. Of course we want to see talks between sensible and responsible people, and of course the quartet wants to carry these things forward. We are working very closely with the quartet, as well as through the UN and the EU. However, particularly if Hamas is to be involved, the requirements are that it recognises Israel and that there is some sign of that going forward-we may hear about that in a moment. It must also renounce violence and abide by previous agreements. That is what the quartet requires to get things going again, but so far we are not quite there.

The Lord Bishop of Exeter: My Lords, two years ago the UK Government were co-sponsors of the text of UN Resolution 1860, which, among other things, emphasised the need to ensure a sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossing. Is it not now time for the Security Council to review the full implementation by all parties of those high-meaning and well-intentioned words?

Lord Howell of Guildford: The right reverend Prelate is of course right that this is what we want to see and what we want to press forward. In a sense, these matters are under review all the time. We are working very closely with the UN and the quartet, through DfID, our own aid department, and through constant dialogue with the Israeli authorities about getting the blockades lifted and getting some enterprise going. The Israelis have also announced-this may be a tiny glimmer that we should hang on to-that they will allow some exports from Gaza. Of course, that is essential if the economy is to begin to move forward. If we are to get people out of massive and miserable poverty there, the Israelis must allow business to flourish. Therefore, yes, there must be a review but a review is going on all the time and we must continue to be vigorous in our efforts.

Lord Turnberg: My Lords, despite the terrible antipathy between Hamas and Israel, does the noble Lord agree that we should build on the many positive grassroots interactions which exist between Gazans and Israelis? In the medical field, for example, there are many Gazan patients in Israeli hospitals, as well as doctors in training there, so should we not be building on those positive grassroots efforts?

Lord Howell of Guildford: Yes, that is perfectly true, and very high-quality treatment has been, and is, available in Israel to meet certain urgent needs from Gazan citizens. One could go further and say that it would be good if the tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand, Gazans who used to cross the border every day to work in Israel were allowed greater movement on that front as well. I agree that there are things on which to build but overall we have to get some sense of agreement and understanding between Israel and the Palestine authority as a whole to get things going forward. We are just not there at the moment.

Baroness Tonge: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the head of the Shin Bet security service said this week that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups are behind a lot of the Gaza violence? Is he also aware that the same Shin Bet security service is saying that Hamas wants to achieve its aims through charity organisations, while other, more radical groups want the same goal through violence? Will the Minister agree that, this being the case, we should be talking to Hamas and including it in all our negotiations with Israel to protect Israel and prevent the situation deteriorating further?

Lord Howell of Guildford: I understand that from my noble friend, who has been absolutely tireless in pursuing these matters in great detail, and I congratulate her. Of course, accusations fly around and, as she knows better than I do, there is more than one aspect or wing and more than one associated policy within the Hamas group. There are people in Hamas for whom it would be invaluable to find common ground and to meet the conditions that the quartet requires, as I described earlier. However, I am afraid that there are also people in Hamas who are not interested in that but who are interested in violence and, indeed, presumably organise the rocketry into Israel every day. Therefore, we somehow have to find a way through this maze, and I think that my noble friend understands that very well.

Disabled People: Transport
	 — 
	Question

Lord Low of Dalston: To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will support the recent compromise agreement reached through the conciliation procedure on the proposed European regulation on bus and coach passenger rights, and what further steps they are taking to meet the United Kingdom's obligations under Article 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Earl Attlee: My Lords, the UK Government intend to support the compromise agreement reached by the Conciliation Committee in respect of the EU regulation on bus and coach passenger rights when it is put to the Council for formal approval. The UK Government are currently preparing a report on what the UK is doing to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Lord Low of Dalston: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. As regards the provision introducing mandatory disability awareness training for personnel dealing directly with the travelling public, will the Government take Transport for London's current approach of training all staff in disability awareness as the benchmark for all bus operators? Cannot the five-year exemption for drivers be viewed as unnecessary?

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I am not aware of precisely what Transport for London is doing, but clearly training for drivers and all staff involved in the transport system is nothing other than good practice. If the operators are not doing that now, they should be. On the point about seeking an exemption, we will be consulting on the implementation of any exemptions but will grant them only if necessary.

Lord Borrie: My Lords, is it the Minister's understanding that the Government wish to persist in the abolition of the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, which is listed for abolition under the Public Bodies Bill? If so, can he explain why the Government want to persist with its abolition? The problems of disability and accessibility to transport crop up so frequently that it is very difficult to understand the Government's position and reasoning.

Earl Attlee: My Lords, the Department for Transport will continue to ensure that transport policies promote equality, and these important issues will continue to be mainstreamed in departmental policy and delivery. The department will consult on the successor arrangements later this year.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, when I asked a Question on this subject last week, we had very good answers, but other points were raised by Members of the House. In particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made the point that when she and her husband travel together, one on a disability scooter and one in a wheelchair, they are told that they cannot travel on the same bus. Therefore, there is a point in training bus drivers to be aware of the situation and to make all possible efforts, just as they do with enormous prams and buggies-they take two of them at a time. Obviously, if the places are already taken, no one would expect them to be offered. However, if there is space, would it not be logical to have two spaces for wheelchairs?

Earl Attlee: My Lords, my noble friend said there was some point in having training for drivers. Training for drivers is vital, as I am sure she would agree. The last time that we discussed the issue, I pointed out that there are costs associated with leaving unused spaces on buses for wheelchairs and mobility scooters. We must be careful not to take out too many seats from buses while ensuring that we make proper provision for disabled travellers.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, the Minister is making the right noises, but in government actions speak louder than words. Why did the Government not carry out a full impact assessment on the regulations in order that progress could be made as rapidly as possible?

Earl Attlee: My Lords, when officials negotiate in Brussels, they do the best job that they can for the United Kingdom. They ensure that we do not accept unnecessary burdens on the UK transport industry while protecting the vital rights of disabled travellers.

Lord Greaves: My Lords, is it not a sad fact that there is not much point talking about passenger rights in areas where the bus services are being withdrawn?

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I have noted my noble friend's point.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, further to the Minister's earlier Answer, will he explain-I am afraid that it is the same old question-why we cannot decide this sort of thing for ourselves? Why is it imposed on us by Brussels? Is it not getting beyond a joke?

Earl Attlee: My Lords, this is a shared competence, and the EU is bound by the principle of subsidiarity. EU actions should not be taken unless they are likely to be more effective than actions at national, regional or local level. We believe that member states are best placed to deal with local bus services.

St Lucia: Hurricane Tomas
	 — 
	Question

Baroness Benjamin: To ask Her Majesty's Government what assistance they are providing to the Government of St Lucia following Hurricane Tomas.

Baroness Verma: My Lords, HMS "Manchester" provided power, clean water and food to the towns of Soufriere and Morne Fond St Jacques immediately after Hurricane Tomas. Crew also fixed the roof in Soufriere hospital. The Department for International Development has agreed to pay £212,845 to re-establish water, sanitation and health services in St Lucia and St Vincent. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, which DfID supports, also made a payment of $3,214,000 to St Lucia after the hurricane.

Baroness Benjamin: I thank my noble friend for that comprehensive answer. The devastation caused by Hurricane Tomas last October, which had practically no media coverage in this country, is still having an effect on the people-and on their financial well-being-of St Lucia and the neighbouring islands, St Vincent and the Grenadines. Lives have been lost and it is estimated that £500 million-worth of damage has been done to roads, agriculture, buildings and infrastructure. Thankfully, the United Nations made a plea for international financial assistance. What financial assistance will the British Government give to these wounded Caribbean islands, and will the Government of St Lucia be expected to pay back any funds provided to them-and, if so, when?

Baroness Verma: My Lords, the Government of St Lucia are leading the assessment of the damage caused by Hurricane Tomas and setting reconstruction priorities. A full report is expected later this month. Early damage estimates following hurricanes are often radically revised, so we cannot speculate on the extent of the damage until we analyse the report.

Lord Palmer: My Lords, given that more than 60 per cent of the GDP of the island is generated by tourism, would it not be extremely helpful to abolish the APD to St Lucia and the neighbouring islands? I declare an interest as a residual beneficiary of an estate on the island.

Baroness Verma: My Lords, the Government cannot change the rules for Caribbean countries without objective justification. The APD on a return economy ticket typically represents a small percentage of the price. However, we are exploring changes to the aviation tax system, including a per-plane tax. Of course, any major changes will be subject to consultation.

Lord Chidgey: Is my noble friend aware that, as a result of World Trade Organisation restrictions on EU trade preferences, St Lucia and Windward Island farmers can no longer compete with the industrial-scale banana production of Latin America? What measures are the Government taking to assist the Windward Isles to diversify and revitalise their fragile and struggling economies?

Baroness Verma: My Lords, as my noble friend is aware, we do not give bilateral aid to St Lucia. All aid and help is provided through multilateral organisations. I will take back the point that he raised and hope to provide him with a Written Answer.

Lord Boswell of Aynho: My Lords, I declare an interest because my daughter is resident for much of the time in the Caribbean. Does not this episode underline the importance of a continuing, frequent and regular Royal Navy presence in the area, in order to give immediate assistance on such occasions?

Baroness Verma: My Lords, my noble friend raises an important point. However, our DfID programmes are concentrated mostly on a regional presence and are there to assist in climate change, disaster and risk management, and to tackle crime and insecurity. I will take back my noble friend's question. However, we are doing quite a lot of constructive work through multilateral agencies.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: My Lords, does the Minister agree that we should acknowledge the importance of €200 million in humanitarian aid that the European Union is contributing, the considerable funding that goes towards disaster preparedness in the Caribbean, and the disaster management programmes there?

Baroness Verma: I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness. She has summarised concisely what we are doing.

Health: Influenza Vaccination
	 — 
	Question

Lord Kennedy of Southwark: To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to review the advice on the availability of the flu vaccination.

Earl Howe: My Lords, the Government's policy on flu vaccination is informed by the expert advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. The JCVI last met on 30 December to review the latest evidence. The committee decided that there were no grounds to change the risk groups that are offered vaccination and recommended that efforts be focused on maximising vaccine uptake among all those in the risk groups. As with all vaccination programmes, the JCVI will keep this matter under review.

Lord Kennedy of Southwark: I thank the noble Earl for his response. The latest figures show that approximately 780 people are in critical care, and there is still a long winter ahead of us. What steps are the Government taking in case the numbers continue to rise? Secondly, what steps have been taken to address the reported shortages of flu vaccines in some areas, with GPs and pharmacies running out of stocks?

Earl Howe: My Lords, the noble Lord's figures are slightly historic. Figures due to be published today will give a better picture. I spoke yesterday to the Chief Medical Officer, who told me that the rates to be published at 2 pm today will show a decrease from the figure that he mentioned. There has also been a further decrease since the new figure and it appears that the worst is over as regards the incidence of flu. On the second question, there have been reports of vaccine shortages. We have taken steps to address that by releasing stocks of the monovalent H1N1 vaccine from our national stock. That system is working well. There is an online ordering system, which GPs are using. They are also ordering stock directly from the manufacturers and we understand that that system is working well, too. The reports of shortages are, I hope, a matter of history.

Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, is my noble friend aware-I am sure that he is not-that over Christmas I presented myself at my GP's for a flu vaccination? There was no vaccine in the surgery. He gave me a prescription, but there was no vaccine in the pharmacy, where I was informed that the general flu vaccine in this country had run out because the suppliers had run out of stock. I am delighted that the swine flu vaccine is still available, but surely that does not help any attempt to be vaccinated against general flu.

Earl Howe: My Lords, we are very clear that the amount of vaccine produced for this season's flu to address the probable need for vaccination was more than adequate. It is up to GPs to order the quantity of vaccine that they see as appropriate for their patients. That is what has happened over the past couple of years. Supplies are also ordered independently by private pharmacies. As regards my noble friend's point on the H1N1 monovalent vaccine, I am afraid that 90 per cent of deaths have been from what is called swine flu, so that is a very appropriate vaccine to use in these circumstances.

Lord Hughes of Woodside: Will the Minister comment on reports in today's press that the Department of Health is intending to take back in house the ordering of flu vaccines because GPs have not done it properly?

Earl Howe: My Lords, almost all vaccines, except the seasonal flu vaccines, are procured centrally because central procurement provides a cost-effective arrangement that can take account of the variation in supply and demand. It also gives us the ability to track where the batches of vaccine have gone. We are therefore looking at taking into the department the procurement of the seasonal flu vaccine.

Lord Patel: Last time we discussed this subject, I asked the Minister why the advice given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States was so different from the advice from our committee on vaccination. My question this time is: is the Minister sure that the advice that he gets from our committee takes into account evidence that other countries gather and on which they base their advice? The CDC's advice in the United States is to vaccinate everybody over the age of six months.

Earl Howe: Yes, I am satisfied. The expert advice provided by the JCVI takes into consideration first and foremost the epidemiology of the disease in the UK, which may well differ from that in other countries. The noble Lord may be interested to know that, while the UK is experiencing H1N1 as the most prevalent flu strain, the prevalent flu strains in the United States are H3N2 and influenza B, so a very different situation applies in that country.

Lord Newton of Braintree: My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of an at-risk group who got vaccinated fairly early at the request of his doctor, which I acknowledge was based on expert advice. To follow on from the previous question, the plain fact is that that expert advice proved, in effect, to be politically unsustainable in one way or another. I think that that needs to be taken into account when we look at what we do next year.

Earl Howe: I can reassure my noble friend that the advice that the JCVI gives is subject to regular review. Clearly, before the next flu season, it will be looking again at the experience of the current flu season.

Lord Campbell-Savours: What lessons have Ministers learnt from the management of the vaccine programme over the past six months? Is there anything that they may be prepared to do differently next year?

Earl Howe: My Lords, the main lesson is one to which I referred a minute ago. We are considering bringing back into central procurement the purchasing of the seasonal flu vaccine, which is an exception to the normal rule. We purchase most vaccines centrally, apart from that one. There is a lot to be said for changing the ordering system so that we can keep better track of supplies and, perhaps, have more cost-effective procurement at the same time.

Baroness Hussein-Ece: My Lords, I read a report in the media last week saying that, in light of the high incidence of children under five contracting flu, the Government are preparing to examine new evidence from the advisory group that could allow for all under-fives to be vaccinated. Have the Government reached a view on this?

Earl Howe: We have not reached a view on this because the JCVI's advice remains unchanged. In fact, current evidence shows that children under five are not the age group with the highest risk of death. The age group with the highest risk of death from the flu that is circulating currently is middle-aged adults. Nevertheless, those with risk factors have the highest risk of severe disease and death from flu compared with healthy age groups. However, I can tell my noble friend that nothing is set in stone. We do not wish to constrain the JCVI in any way and we will listen to its advice, as we always do.

Baroness Thornton: My Lords, during the H1N1 pandemic, two organisations stood out as being essential to delivering a pandemic strategy: the Health Protection Agency, for its science, strategic planning and advice; and the PCTs, for their support and co-ordination on the ground. Both are due to be abolished in the next two years. Can the Minister inform the House about the Government's pandemic plans, including, for example, the ordering of sufficient vaccine, both after the abolition and during the transition?

Earl Howe: The noble Baroness asks an important question. The Government's plans are to create what we are calling Public Health England, which will be the new public health service based centrally, linked closely to public health efforts in local authorities with local directors of public health. A pandemic vaccination campaign would be mobilised through those channels. I am clear that we have proper plans for the transition, which the noble Baroness rightly mentions as being a time when we need to have a specific focus on public health protection. The present plan, as she knows, is to bring the Health Protection Agency functions within the Department of Health so that there is a clear line of accountability from the Secretary of State downwards. I am clear that that is right. We will still have the expert advice that we do now from the people who are currently employed in the Health Protection Agency. That is an additional safeguard.

Business of the House
	 — 
	Timing of Debates

Moved By Lord Strathclyde
	That the debate on the motion in the name of Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean set down for today shall be limited to 5 hours.
	Motion agreed.

Coalition Government
	 — 
	Debate

Moved By Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
	To call attention to the constitutional and parliamentary effect of coalition government; and to move for papers.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, when I tabled this debate, I, of course, had no idea that it would take place against such a tumultuous parliamentary and constitutional background as we have seen in the House this week. I thank all noble Lords who are here today, particularly those who put their names down to speak. As it happens, the timing of today's debate could hardly be more apposite: if anyone wishes to see the parliamentary and constitutional effect of a coalition Government, they need look no further than what we have experienced in your Lordships' House this week.
	This is the first peacetime coalition in this country for more than 70 years. Of course, coalitions are more familiar elsewhere. They are familiar in Scotland and Wales now and in many local councils. Coalition Governments are both commonplace and widespread beyond these shores and the experience of such coalitions has helped coalition government specialists to characterise coalition Governments as of particular kinds. There are coalitions of conviction formed on specific issues such as the Conservative/Liberal Unionist coalition in 1895, which was formed to resist Irish home rule. There are coalitions of necessity, brought about by specific external circumstances, such as the wartime Lloyd George coalition of 1916 and the Churchill coalition of 1940, and there are coalitions of convenience, determined by the politics of the parties involved.
	We on these Benches would argue that the current coalition in Britain is of the third kind. On the other hand, the Government seek to argue that it is a coalition of an entirely new kind: one of co-operation, whereby two parties with different political views agree to co-operate for limited purposes and for a limited time in order to ensure effective Government. What is clear is that this coalition is different from previous ones in this country in a number of important respects. The first and most important is that this coalition has not been voted for as a coalition by the British people. In the past, the peacetime coalitions of 1918 and 1931 were endorsed by the country-with landslide majorities. But this coalition is born out of an indecisive election. Labour lost. The Liberal Democrats did not do very well and lost a few seats, and the Conservatives did best, but not well enough to win. On that basis, the Government have embarked on major constitutional change.
	Of course, constitutional reform was a major feature of the Labour Government, of which I was proud to serve as a Minister. But there are significant differences from the constitutional reforms under Labour and those being pursued by the coalition. The first rests on the lack of a clear-cut mandate for the reform programme that is fundamental to the coalition. The Labour Government signalled the vast majority of their reforms well in advance-although not all. We were rightly challenged in this House. Indeed, proceedings came to a complete halt as I recall over the reform of the Office of the Lord Chancellor. But virtually all our other reforms were heralded in our manifesto. On the whole, we did what we said we were going to do.
	That is not so with the current coalition. Both parties have manifestos and campaigned on them. The Liberal Democrats even went beyond their manifesto undertakings in making specific and individual pledges over the issue of tuition fees. Liberal Democrat MPs signed a pledge not to increase fees, clearly implying that a signed pledge was somehow more secure; a better promise than a mere manifesto. So, for example, the 7 per cent more 18 to 24 year-olds who voted in the 2010 election, and voted Liberal Democrat, gave their support on the basis of that promise, which in the end turned out to be a false prospectus.
	In the event, the formation of the coalition saw both parties in the coalition having to ditch their manifestos, first, in favour of an outline agreement between the two parties published on 12 May and then in a fuller document called The Coalition:Our Programme for Government, published on 20 May.

Lord Steel of Aikwood: From her considerable experience in the Foreign Office, does the noble Baroness agree that no other country, including Scotland with its more limited agenda, would dream of putting a coalition together in as little as five days?

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was not going to dwell on the five days because, as the noble Lord will know, many thought that it was rather a rushed job.
	The document was published by the Cabinet Office rather than by the parties concerned. Of course, it was a legitimate and sensible course of action to take for the coalition, but it has never been endorsed by the electorate in this country. I make that point as clearly as I can, because many people believe that we are likely to have more coalitions in the future, partly because of the breakdown of traditional voting patterns in this country and because there will be many more coalitions if a system of AV or proportional representation is introduced, as the Liberal Democrats want. However, it means that there are serious questions about how far any coalition government can rest on the old conventions of parliamentary practice.
	The coalition has recognised that. The nature of its constitutional programme seeks to alter our institutions. So does its practice in government. For example, the Cabinet has been significantly altered by the coalition removing, in effect, the powers of the Prime Minister on the appointment and dismissal of Ministers and placing those in the hands of others on a party political basis, and by the explicit abandoning of the constitutional doctrine of Cabinet and ministerial collective responsibility in a range of policy areas, such as the crucial decision on the renewal of our nuclear defence system.
	The proposal for a referendum on AV directly addresses the Westminster electoral system, while the rearranging of constituencies proposed in the Bill that we have debated this week will fundamentally alter Parliament in a way not done since the 1832 Act. I am not seeking to argue the merits of the Bill but merely to argue that, if enacted, these proposals will permanently alter the way in which Britain is governed. Given the fundamental point that no one voted for this programme, the constitutional ambitions of the coalition are bound to raise some very difficult questions.
	The nature of the coalition Government has particular implications for this House because of the Salisbury convention, the best and most recent definition of which-best because it was agreed by all parties in both Houses-is contained in the report on the conventions of the UK Parliament from the Joint Committee on Conventions chaired by noble friend Lord Cunningham of Felling and on which I have the privilege to serve. The Joint Committee laid out that the convention means that, in this House:
	"A manifesto Bill is accorded a Second Reading ... A manifesto Bill is not subject to 'wrecking amendments' ...; and ... A manifesto Bill is passed and sent (or returned) to the House of Commons, so that they have the opportunity, in reasonable time, to consider the Bill or any amendments the Lords may wish to propose".
	The standing of the Salisbury convention is clear. Where a proposal from the coalition Government was contained in the 2010 general election manifestos of both the political parties in the coalition, that proposal would rightly be subject to the Salisbury convention. But it is those proposals alone that are subject to the convention and not the proposals in the coalition document, except where they appeared in both manifestos.
	Of course, I recognise that there is a strong counterpoint to be put here, although I do not believe that it is an overriding one. That is, in being asked by Her Majesty to form a Government, the coalition enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons, meaning that what the Government do in the Commons and in this House must have commensurate authority. However, that does not detract from the legitimacy gap at the heart of the coalition, particularly in relation to constitutional reform.
	Neither manifesto proposed a referendum on AV and neither proposed the reduction in the number of MPs proposed in the Bill discussed this week. Therefore, the Bill is not a manifesto Bill and not subject to the convention. The Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, which we shall debate shortly, was in the Liberal Democrat manifesto but not in that of the Conservatives, so, again, the Salisbury convention will not apply.
	The House of Lords Reform Bill was in both manifestos. We will judge on their merits the proposals for reform when we finally see them, but we on this side of the Chamber are determined to give the proposals the scrutiny that the issues merit, just as we have given proper scrutiny to the coalition's proposals to change the voting system and the number of constituencies. We believe that the entire issue of further House of Lords reform should be put in a referendum to the people of the country. If a voting system which benefits the Liberal Democrats is worthy of a referendum, surely one of the key checks and balances in our constitution, this House, is equally worthy of a referendum.
	The coalition has produced a number of other significant constitutional innovations. There is the Cabinet manual, at which I am sure many of your Lordships will have looked, but none of us has yet debated it. It was written by a small group of senior officials in consultation with some clever academics, but neither House has debated the full document. What is the status of the document? Can the Leader of the House tell us whether it is the first step towards a written constitution, as accepted by the Cabinet Secretary, or is it, as stated by the noble Lord in reply to a Question in this House from my noble friend Lady Royall, of a rather different nature? If it is of the importance and enduring significance implied by Sir Gus O'Donnell, surely we should debate it fully and soon.
	Of course, some reforms are welcome and very helpful; for example, revealing the date of the Budget. Once, that was a sacking offence, but it is a sensible and right move. Similarly, setting out the dates of Recesses is laudable and, frankly, I wish that my party had done it years ago. But sadly, such a sensible approach is not applied elsewhere. Since 10 January, coalition Peers have joined us so fast that, including today's Introductions, the coalition majority is 71. It has risen from 54 to 71 in just seven working days. We have to ensure that this House remains a revising Chamber, not an approving Chamber. In effect, we have returned to the pre-1997 position. The Conservative-led Government have an unassailable majority in both Houses, not because of a landslide victory in a general election, but because of a coalition agreement. If, for example, the Conservatives had won a landslide victory at the 2010 election, they would have a majority in another place, but certainly not in here. By performing worse in the election than predicted, they have gained a stranglehold on both Houses.
	That has serious implications because an important part of the role of this House is the role of the Cross-Bench Peers. As independents, they listen to, assess and make judgments on the arguments they hear, and they vote accordingly. They are a huge asset to us and a huge constitutional asset to the country. But that important constitutional role in this House as the provider of checks and balances is under threat with so many coalition Peers coming in.
	The conventions on how we operate are indeed important. The Companion tells us that there is a firm convention that from Monday to Wednesday, the House will rise at 10 pm. The Companion describes a closure Motion as "a most exceptional procedure"-very strong words-but it has been deployed twice this week. That has been done because the Government really believe that it is fair to use it on an issue which is not the subject of the Salisbury convention, which has had no pre-legislative scrutiny and no public consultation. We disagree. What is clear is that the application of closure Motions in this way is tantamount to a guillotine. Of course it is not a guillotine on the whole Bill, but it is clearly a guillotine on individual amendments. It is a guillotine that I do not believe is appropriate in this House, and I hope that it will never be appropriate.
	What is clear is that this kind of parliamentary innovation is of a piece with similar innovations in the coalition. I refer to the use, for example, of framework legislation, which is similarly problematic. The Public Bodies Bill has been extensively criticised on constitutional grounds. As has been well put in this House, in the Bill the Government are seeking to use Henry VIII powers on an industrial scale. That is just plain wrong. It is not a correct use of such powers, and those powers were rightly criticised by many constitutional experts as being something inapplicable in a modern democracy. Moreover, coalition Ministers have questioned the decision in this House to seek to vote down secondary legislation, specifically on tuition fees. There are clear provisions in the terms of the Cunningham committee-

Lord Lawson of Blaby: I have been listening to the noble Baroness with great attention because she always speaks in a very reasonable way, so will she give a reasonable answer to this question? She has talked about a number of things she considers appropriate and a number of things that she considers inappropriate. Does she consider a filibuster to be appropriate or inappropriate?

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I consider holding the Government to account, which is what I have witnessed this week, to be entirely appropriate.

Noble Lords: Oh!

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, there will be different views. I have endeavoured in my remarks so far to put my points as reasonably as the noble Lord has expressed, but I should not have thought that jeering was quite the way we would want to conduct a serious debate of this nature. However, the noble Lord may think differently.
	The Cunningham committee report stipulates precisely how attempting to vote down secondary legislation can be legitimately done. We stayed wholly and completely within the terms of those provisions, and we did so because they had been explicitly agreed in both Houses.
	On Bills of constitutional importance, the Constitution Committee of your Lordships' House has taken a very firm line. It says that,
	"it is a matter of principle that proposals for major constitutional reform should be subject to prior consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny, unless there are good reasons for departing from this principle".
	On the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, it said that:
	"Pre-legislative scrutiny and public consultation would have enabled a better assessment of whether the new rules as to equalisation are overly rigid".
	It had similar criticisms to make of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill and the Public Bodies Bill. Those criticisms were pungent and forthright. I just make the point that six members of that committee are coalition Peers. Two are Cross-Benchers, and only four come from the opposition Benches.
	Coalition is different. This coalition is different from all previous coalitions. It is different in origin. It was different in its formation. It is different in its purpose. And it is different in its effect. We believe that many of the steps the coalition is taking in terms of the constitution and in terms of Parliament are wrong. Wrong in policy terms, yes, of course; but that is not the point that I am arguing. I mean wrong in terms of Parliament and wrong in terms of the constitution.
	We believe that we are acting properly in defence of the constitution, as this House is meant to do. Do not just take my word for it. Think about what Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg, Member for North East Somerset, and indeed the son of a distinguished Member of your Lordships' House, said in another place this week in the final stages of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. He said of our all night session that,
	"it is notable that their lordships sat throughout last night, fulfilling their proper constitutional role of ensuring that a serious constitutional change is properly debated and reviewed".
	He said that the Peers were,
	"battling for the great British constitution, which has served us extraordinarily well for hundreds of years".-[Official Report, Commons, 18/1/11; col. 708.]
	Let me quote from another very strong Conservative supporter, Mr Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph, whose piece on the coalition's constitutional reforms in December contained, yes, very many sharp criticisms of my own party, but he went on to say that,
	"the Coalition has chosen to ignore or contradict parts of the parties' respective manifestos, which raises the question of who actually voted for what we are being offered now; it has chosen to try to gerrymander parliamentary boundaries, without any sort of mandate to do so; it has chosen to try to change the voting system, without any sort of mandate to do so; it has chosen to try to have fixed-term parliaments, without any sort of mandate to do so; and for good measure there will be no Queen's Speech next year, because it would be an inconvenience for the executive".
	Not my words, but the words of the Conservative commentator. He also said:
	"It seems to regard its creation as some sort of miracle, and a miracle requiring all the rules to be bent, twisted and otherwise mangled to keep it intact".
	Discussions on coalitions in British politics cannot avoid including reference to Disraeli's famous comment. As the first speaker in the debate, I claim the right today to deploy the comment first. In a speech in the Commons on 16 December 1852, Disraeli said:
	"But coalitions, although successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief. This too I know, that England does not love coalitions".-[Official Report, Commons, 16/12/1852; col.1666.]
	In the fullness of time, we will see how prescient Disraeli was about this coalition in overall terms. But in terms of parliamentary and constitutional impact of the coalition, we on this side of the Chamber would contest that Disraeli's prediction is already true.

Lord Wakeham: My Lords, the first thing I would like to do is to congratulate the noble Baroness on proposing the Motion in, as we would have expected, a vigorous and forceful way. She may have been a bit luckier than she anticipated in exactly when her Motion came to be debated, but nevertheless it was a forceful speech. This is the first opportunity that I have of saying publicly to her, since she was very helpful to me on the committee we had dealing with expenses, how much I enjoyed working with her on that occasion. Once or twice I was not quite sure whether she was on my side but nevertheless she always made a constructive contribution to it and very much helped in producing the final result.
	I want particularly just to talk about the parliamentary aspects of a coalition. Much has been written about these things, and the noble Baroness has added a number of things to it. As for her quotations from the Joint Committee on Conventions that she did with her noble friend who was around a few minutes ago, I think that she perhaps chose that part which suited her arguments best. Indeed, in its report the committee says it believes that the Salisbury convention has changed significantly and does not believe that it should be called the Salisbury convention any more. At paragraph 102, it also indicated that,
	"evidence points to the emergence in recent years of a practice that the House of Lords will usually give a Second Reading to any government Bill, whether based on the manifesto or not".
	So we are in a new situation here. I do not want to dwell on the events of the past few days-except to say, if I may, that the exchange between my noble friend the Leader of the House and the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition, exactly a week ago today at Questions, was extremely helpful and was one which many of us appreciated.
	It is more than 30 years since I started to be involved in the management of parliamentary business. I cannot see that the management of parliamentary business or the rules that govern it have altered substantially since then. Of course, there have been changes. The noble Baroness talked about the number of new Peers who have come into the House. At the beginning of this Parliament, I think that I am correct to say that more than 50 per cent of the House had been created under the Labour Government, so a number of new Peers have been brought into this House by both Governments. The main problem now is to find a seat to sit on, but we all share in that responsibility-and of deciding how we will go on in this place.
	In the 30 years during which I have looked at parliamentary procedures, things have substantially deteriorated. To be fair, the rot set in in the House of Commons. I believe that the automatic timetabling of business was a great mistake. I very much regret that the present Government have not felt able to remove that from the House of Commons. Timetable Motions are, of course, sometimes necessary; in my experience, in many cases the Opposition want the timetable Motion because it is a very practical way for them to show complete opposition to a Bill. They would much sooner have a guillotine to demonstrate that point and then have some orderly planning of the rest of the debate than what has been going on in the past few days-I said that I would not talk about the past few days, so I will not.

Lord Higgins: Will my noble friend make it clear in his remarks about timetable Motions that he is speaking about the House of Commons, as a timetable Motion in this House would be totally new and extremely dangerous?

Lord Wakeham: I certainly have no desire for a timetable Motion in this House. I will try to explain why I think that it would be extremely undesirable. That is not to say that it might not be necessary, but I very much hope that it will not. The whole of my political career in, if you like, business management, has been to avoid such things, except, as I said, on certain occasions where both sides reckoned that it was the best way forward. I never reached the point that the dear man, Michael Foot, did when he moved four timetable Motions in one day in the House of Commons and, when pressed, said that the reason why he was doing it was that the Government had such a small majority that that was the only way to get the legislation through. Some of us agreed that that was probably right.
	The basis on which I have felt that parliamentary business should be conducted is as follows. First, a Government who have a majority in the Commons are entitled to get their business through. It is not, in principle, the job of Oppositions to seek to frustrate the will of the Government of the country. Secondly, Oppositions should never lose sight of the fact that they will be the Government one day. That has always been the position, and therefore Oppositions should never do anything that they would disapprove of if they were in government. That is a proper constraint on Oppositions at all times. Thirdly, Oppositions have their rights in political debate, and it is the responsibility of the government Front Bench and government business managers to deliver to the Opposition the rights that they reasonably should have. That always has been, and it always will be.
	Fourthly, in this House it is not always sensible to press matters to a Division when there is absolutely no possibility of the House of Commons agreeing with them. This House is a revising House and is at its best when it seeks to ask the House of Commons to look again, particularly where the House of Commons is singing-if I may say so-an unclear note on an issue. That is where this House is right. I can remember, when I first got here, first Lord Callaghan and then Lord Whitelaw each saying, "Of course I respect the right of your Lordships to press this amendment, but the question is: is it wise? Is it a sensible use of time to seek to pass amendments that have no prospect whatever of ever being taken up by the House of Commons?". That is something that we should bear in mind when we are doing it.
	All of what I have been saying to you is, in fact, "the usual channels". That is how things should be negotiated. From time to time in our history it is impossible to negotiate a satisfactory arrangement. There is then no alternative but for the Government to do something-the Government have to get their business. So I am 100 per cent in favour of negotiations and I want to see them going on all the time. If it does not happen, then it is the Government's responsibility to propose a solution for which they will have to get a majority. I finish by saying that the sentence that I like best in this subject was said in a speech by the late Lord Biffen, who many of us were great admirers of, in which he said that the agenda for political debate needs to be fixed, so that the discussions can be fierce and competitive.

Lord Tyler: My Lords, I broadly agree with everything that my noble friend has just said, but that is not surprising because he speaks with almost unique experience of both Houses of Parliament. I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, on a very timely debate, because we are after all in a different situation so it is good that we take this time. However, I have to say to her that, when a Labour supporter quotes Mr Simon Heffer, I tend to discount some of the rest of the argument.
	Ever since the 1920s, when the Liberal Party descended into the doldrums, an almost total political duopoly has grown up in this country, at parliamentary level at least, between the Labour and Conservative parties. In 1951, we should recall, when Labour and the Conservatives won 96.7 per cent of the vote, the Liberals won only six seats. The electorate was largely settled in its political allegiance, often along social and economic, and even hereditary, lines. I recall in my first successful election in 1964-I was very, very young-banging on doors and often getting the response, "Oh, my husband is a union member, so we are Labour", or, "We are in business, so we are Conservative". Occasionally, people said, "We have always been Methodists, so my family are Liberals". Allegiance was automatic, but that is no longer the case.
	Dramatic changes have taken place over that period, but Britain nevertheless got used to a stable two-party pendulum. Up till 1979, the pendulum moved fairly regularly and fairly modestly; then came the minority Governments of Thatcher, Major and Blair. Curiously, as the pendulum swung less often-but often with more force-the mandate for Governments with large Commons majorities declined. Thatcher had a 43-seat majority in 1979 on only 43 per cent of the popular vote. She then got a majority of 144 seats on a lesser vote of 42.4 per cent in 1983 and a 102-seat majority on a very similar share in 1987. Then, in 1992, John Major won more votes than any Prime Minister before or since, yet he was returned with a smaller Commons majority of just 21. In 1997, Blair won only 43 per cent of the vote-far fewer votes than Major-but Labour won a majority of 179 seats.
	All these capricious, irrational results can be explained by the gradual pluralisation of political choice, constrained by an intrinsically binary political system. However, just as people had begun to demand more choices as consumers, so they wanted to exercise more choice in their politics. The situation that we now face-so well described earlier-is that the parties and Parliament are having to catch up with where the people have already led. By 2010, the total vote for Labour and Conservatives had declined to less than two thirds-fully one third went to parties other than the big two.
	So what does this mean? It means that, in the context of this debate, the public as a collective are quite clear that they want more than two answers to any given political question. Voters are no longer wrapped up in red cloth, blue cloth or even a golden sash. Party and class alignment are all but dead as voters float among the parties between elections and even during election campaigns-what psephologists refer to as "churn".
	The verdict of the most recent general election was clearly that no one had really won. In the most propitious circumstances, the Conservatives could not defeat Labour, and despite astonishing scaremongering in the media about the dire effects of a hung Parliament, more people voted for the Liberal Democrats-and indeed for other, smaller parties-than at any time since the party's inception in 1989. It hardly betrays any secrets to say that the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition was thought to be an impossible outcome. To their credit, however, the Conservatives were more prepared to embrace the facts of modern politics-that coalitions may be necessary to make government work-than were their Labour counterparts.
	The coalition was a popular change: 59 per cent supported the coalition after the election and many-contrary to the hopes and assumptions of noble Lords opposite-still do. People like the idea of politicians working together and putting aside the pantomime partisanship that they see so childishly displayed in Prime Minister's Questions. Despite the popularity of the concept, of course, there has been disquiet about the consequences, to which the noble Lady has referred. The consequence is simply and inexorably compromise. Just as in every boardroom around the country, and in committees of all the organisations that we are all involved in, accommodations and common decisions are reached from different perspectives, so that now happens around the Cabinet table. Indeed, there is more open discussion of issues, as we understand it, than under the Blair and Brown regimes.
	Again, the public seem to be relatively relaxed about that. Only the media-the square mile of the Westminster village-hanker for times when things were simpler, when one party would win perhaps 35 per cent of the vote, gain a big majority of seats and do what it liked. That was all very straightforward, but it no longer works for the public.
	Manifesto commitments have been jettisoned in the past by majority Governments-for example, on electoral reform, tuition fees and privatisation proposals under the previous Government-whereas, with the coalition, the process is actually more transparent. The coalition agreement contains strands of policy that are clearly from one manifesto or the other. Indeed, those who were close to the negotiations-I was not there-can tell us that they usually chose the best policy of the two parties rather than attempt simply to water down either one or the other. Any dispassionate person can now look through that coalition agreement and see the Liberal Democrat parts, the Conservative parts and the parts that represent a blend.
	It has been argued, and it was hinted at earlier, that a coalition Government is one that nobody has voted for. Technically, I suppose that that is true. However, what is also true is that the electorate has a much more likely prospect of seeing a broad preference than a wholesale endorsement of any one party's manifesto. Indeed, one thing that deters people from joining parties is that they think that all party members must share the same detailed commitments. That is obviously not true, but it puts people off. Sensible people think it weird, frankly, that anyone should say that they must wholeheartedly sign up to the policy platform of one party without a scintilla of qualification. With coalitions, there is a natural tendency to get what people want. That certainly happened to a very large extent to the voters of 2010.
	We all face a difficulty in adjusting to this situation, but I think that the public have adjusted better than either the media or many in politics. Sensible people respond well to this spirit of compromise and to the sense that, where there is no winner, no one should take all. We had better get used to it. As Professor John Curtice has pointed out-I have not the time to go through all his reasons-the hung Parliament that occurred after 6 May was no one-off aberration. He has outlined three specific reasons why-even under first past the post, if that continues-we will have more hung Parliaments, so it is important that we in politics should adjust to that and respond to what the public clearly wish to achieve.
	It is extremely important that the factors to which Professor Curtice refers, which make hung Parliaments a regular reality, impose some new disciplines on all of us involved in Parliament and in politics. Frankly, it is a good thing that we move towards where the public have already led. I do not accept that negotiation and agreement between adults should be painted as somehow grubby or as horse trading. At least the negotiation is a great deal more open than what happened in the elective dictatorship of recent so-called majority Governments.
	All of us who are involved in the profession of politics-it is a profession-have a very important opportunity to respond to what the public are asking us to do. The Westminster establishment may not be used to these questions or such realities, but to my mind they now broadly reflect the enlightened view of the British public. Politicians should talk to each other more often. There should be no one monopoly on rectitude. It is one of the great features of this House that we never assume that we are the only ones in the right and that all those over there are inevitably wrong, which tends to happen at the other end of the building. That is the best hope for good government. The best hope is plural government, and that may often mean coalition government.

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness for giving us an opportunity to debate these matters. The other place has been despatching to us near-JCB quantities of earthmoving constitutional legislation, which naturally has been absorbing a great deal of the time, attention and nervous energy of your Lordships' House. Relatively unnoticed among the rumble of these great Bills, however, the Cabinet Office sent us shortly before Christmas 148 pages of an entirely new constitutional document: the draft Cabinet manual, as minted by officials, defined by the Cabinet's Home Affairs Committee and approved at full Cabinet level by the commission.
	It is, in my judgment, an artefact of considerable constitutional significance, although it is not, nor is it intended to be, the core of a written constitution. Essentially, it is the Executive's operating manual, describing those moving parts of the constitution and associated procedures that the Executive, both Ministers and officials, believe impinge currently on their work. To their credit, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary wish to have our views on the Cabinet manual before it hardens into a first edition. As it does not, in my view, embrace certain constitutional questions central to the work of your Lordships' House, it deserves serious attention, and I know that shortly the Constitution Committee of your Lordships' House will give it just that.
	Before examining some of the detail, I must declare an interest. I, with other outsiders, helped the Cabinet Office a little with chapter 2 of the Cabinet manual, on elections and government formation, particularly its section on the hung Parliament contingency. I warmly welcome its publication, not merely because of the clarity that it adds to the delicate matter of the Sovereign's remaining personal prerogative of appointing a Prime Minister, but generally as a substantial step towards greater transparency in the engine room of central government.
	On the appointment of a Prime Minister in hung circumstances, the draft manual refines the earlier version of chapter 2, which was given to the Justice Select Committee in the other place at the end of February 2010 and on which that committee reported before the election. With the experience in mind of the five days in May that led to the coalition's eventual formation, paragraph 50 of the draft Cabinet manual now makes explicit what was only implicit in the February 2010 version:
	"The incumbent Prime Minister is not expected to resign until it is clear that there is someone else who should be asked to form a government because they are better placed to command the confidence of the House of Commons and that information has been communicated to the Sovereign".
	The overriding requirement here is that the Monarch is not drawn into the appearance, let alone the reality, of political partisanship, an impulse I profoundly share.
	The original unrevised draft was of critical use for those of us who sat in television and radio studios, for nigh on the whole five days in May, attempting to impersonate the British constitution and being asked constantly what should or should not be happening in constitutional terms. Chapter 2 of the manual generally will be of central use to all concerned if future general elections produce an inconclusive parliamentary arithmetic.
	I turn briefly to what is not captured in the 148 pages of the draft manual. There are two important omissions on the national security side: the placing of all the secret agencies on a statutory footing with the Intelligence Services Act 1994, and the associated parliamentary oversight arrangements, which are not covered. Also not covered are the conventions about how and when Parliament has a say in decisions of war and peace.
	However, the most striking gaps, on the work of your Lordships' House in particular, are the lack of any interpretation of what constitutes a money Bill in the minds of the Executive and of any description of the current reach and vitality of the Salisbury/Addison convention of 1945. As a still recent arrival in your Lordships' House, I respectfully suggest that, from what I have observed here so far, both those questions are of real and immediate concern to many of your Lordships.
	I do not think that we have had an executive view of the condition of Salisbury/Addison since Mr Jack Straw, as Leader of the Commons, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Conventions, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling, which reported in 2006. Both Houses debated that report and it was noted with approval in each case, but the Cunningham report's recommendation that Salisbury/Addison should be the subject of a resolution in your Lordships' House, subsequently communicated to the other place and renamed the "government Bill convention", was not acted on. Given that, until last May, Salisbury/Addison was never faced by the political ecology of coalition and the question of what trumps which manifestos or coalition agreements, the time is right for a serious re-examination of Salisbury/Addison and its replacement with a Strathclyde/Royall/McNally convention.
	The draft Cabinet manual lacks poetry. Not one of its phrases is likely to cling to the Velcro of memory. It is a very British document: a bundle of laws, conventions and procedures, just like the constitution itself. It is also, in parts, what these days we would call "aspiration", especially its chapter on the indispensability of proper collective Cabinet government. The Civil Service, being almost entirely herbivorous, to a man and woman, in its approach to government, must have purred with pleasure when Ministers endorsed this section. Whitehall's herbivores never enjoy command premierships, where collective corners are cut. Cabinet government has enjoyed a revival since last May, possibly because coalitions require higher levels of collegiate spirit and practice. As a fully paid up herbivore myself, I can only welcome this recognition by the coalition of the importance of being collective.

The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness for this debate. The American political theorist Mark Hetherington observed:
	"When government programs require people to make sacrifices, they need to trust that the result will be a better future for everyone. Absent that trust, people will deem such sacrifices as unfair, even punitive, and, thus, will not support the programs that require them."
	The election process of 2010 left voters in no doubt that, because of the financial crisis that faced this country, sacrifices would have to be made by the population. They expected whatever party or parties were elected to have to do difficult things. The outcome of the election indicated that the electorate was unsure which Government would be best able to offer the best return on the sacrifice of jobs, homes, financial security and much else that might have to be made.
	It is in the nature of coalition government, as the excellent Library Note prepared for this debate indicates, that manifestos upon which parties seek election, have to some extent to be set aside. As the noble Baroness has already pointed out, on previous occasions when coalitions have been formed, elections have followed in order to achieve a mandate from the people. This has not happened with the current coalition, and while such a process is not essential, what becomes important is that, constitutionally, the Executive do not take powers to themselves that do not represent the will of the people.
	At the same time, it is in the nature of all Governments, coalitions or otherwise, that they be seen to govern. This means that a hierarchy of priorities has to be established, given the limits of elected time, fixed or otherwise. This Government, as the people expected, have had to make difficult decisions in respect of national debt. Inevitably, this has impacted upon the lives of many ordinary people, who, up until the point of receiving their redundancy notice, believed that the work they were doing was valued and worth while.
	Many people see the present circumstances exacerbated by the failure of the market. Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard, has observed that the market has been treated as omnipotent, possessing all power; omniscient, having all knowledge; and omnipresent, existing everywhere. When the market was in crisis, the Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, described it as, "a crisis of faith" and the financial journalists, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, in their book The Gods That Failed, spoke of the market as promising,
	"paradise if only we would obey and pamper their hero-servants and allow their strange titans and monsters to flourish. We did as they asked, and have placidly swallowed the prescriptions of the lavishly rewarded bankers ... hedge fund managers and private equity tycoons, while turning a blind eye to the rampaging of the exotic derivatives, the offshore trusts and the toxic financial instruments ... These gods have failed. It is time to live without them".
	Whether or not such analyses are accurate, they reveal the dilemma for Government. To tackle such godlike powers holds many risks. The temptation therefore becomes the greater to return to those areas where some evidence of government can be seen; areas such as education, social welfare and healthcare. Legislation made in these areas does not exceed manifesto commitments made by either of the participating parties in the coalition. It cannot simply be a choice of the best parts-after all, who decides?
	I have recently been in conversation with many of the heads of schools in my diocese. They and other teaching professionals speak of themselves as being exhausted by the relentless stream of legislation, jeopardising their fundamental vocation as teachers of the young. On health, I had a meeting this week with local GPs and, while seeing some merit in the proposals for consortia, they were, nevertheless, concerned about the top-down nature of it and the lack of public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny. One observed to me that, if it is to be managed well, many who now serve the PCTs will walk out of one door and in through another, but probably only after the trauma of job loss, with its attendant anxieties and financial insecurity. Why not a process of evolution rather than revolution, they ask?
	I make these points in relation to the NHS first, because prior to the election, the Prime Minister observed:
	"There will be no more pointless reorganisations that aim for change, but instead bring chaos. Too often ministers have rearranged the NHS like they're shuffling a pack of cards ... It reveals an attitude to the NHS that sees it just as a bureaucratic machine to be taken apart and put together again".
	Secondly, its not being a manifesto commitment means that the Executive have again decided upon a policy without the consent of the people, thereby undermining one of the fundamental principles of democratic government. The Prime Minister has asked the public to place their trust in the future in terms of what he has called the big society. It is a bold concept, but one still largely undefined, and at risk of seeming hollow in the light of the loss of jobs and security and the sword of Damocles of much top-down change.
	It was the late Lord Devlin who observed:
	"Society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist ... If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if, having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate."
	Society is based upon relationships, not on contract. There is no justified government without the consent of the governed. In society, we do together what we cannot do alone. There must be joined-up thinking that ties the aims of a big society together with the realities of a mandate from the people in respect of changes as radical as those currently being proposed. Government are required to seek common good under a mandate from the people and common good is the facilitating of society doing justice to the whole as well as to the parts.

Lord Hart of Chilton: My Lords, let me join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, on introducing this timely debate. I declare my membership of the Select Committee on the Constitution, but today, of course, I speak in my personal capacity and not on behalf of the committee, although I shall draw attention to several of the committee's reports in recent years when it has discussed the constitution. The first is the 14th Report of the 2003-04 Session entitled Parliament and the Legislative Process. That report noted a concern that a growth in the volume of legislation was not being matched by Parliament's capacity to scrutinise it effectively. It therefore put forward a number of recommendations aimed at improving matters, including a move to publish more Bills in draft, far greater pre-legislative scrutiny and an emphasis on evidence-taking and consultation.
	It is a self-evident truth that the scrutiny of legislation is fundamental to the work of Parliament and subjecting legislation to rigorous scrutiny is an essential responsibility of both Houses of Parliament if bad law is to be avoided and the technical quality of legislation tested. It is also important that those affected by, or with knowledge of, or having an interest in, proposed legislation should have an opportunity to make their voice heard while legislation is being considered, rather than after it has taken effect. Parliament's influence is usually greater before a Bill has been introduced because Ministers will be more likely to accept change when a Bill is not in a settled state and the Minister is not at the Dispatch Box defending his position. That is why pre-legislative scrutiny is so important and why so many who gave evidence before the committee, including many members of today's coalition, some of whom are speaking in the debate today, were keen to emphasise its importance.
	The committee was aware that not all measures of high political contention have been published in draft in the past and subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, but it did not necessarily regard this as a category for exclusion. As Dr Meg Russell of the Constitution Unit put it, such Bills,
	"are arguably the bills that most need proper scrutiny".
	The committee stated, in paragraph 30:
	"However committed a Government may be to a measure-and however opposed other political parties may be-that does not necessarily mean that the technical elements of its provisions cannot be improved through early debate and objective scrutiny".
	These points are of even greater importance in the case of Bills which seek to change the constitution. In my view, such Bills should always be the subject of full consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny; subsequent committee reports have continually emphasised this, no matter which party is in power. For example, in the 17th report of the Session 08-09 on the Parliamentary Standards Bill, the committee said,
	"The way policy-making has been rushed, the lack of public consultation and the limited opportunities given to Parliament to scrutinise the bill all, in our view, fail to meet the minimum requirements of constitutional acceptability".
	In the 11th reportof 2009-10 on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill the committee said,
	"The House may take the view that the consequence of the Government tabling so many late amendments to the Bill is that the parliamentary consideration given in both Houses to the important aspects of constitutionalreform which this Bill is likely to effect has been substantially curtailed. ... This is no way to undertake the task of constitutional reform".
	When it came to a consideration of the Constitutional Reform Bill-which I remember very well because I was standing next to the bomb when it exploded-and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, there were many, now to be found on the coalition Benches, who protested that insufficient scrutiny had been given to the Bill's contents and that in the case of the Constitutional Reform Bill, it should be directed to a Select Committee. A delay of three months, they said, was nothing if it meant that the Bill was got right. The present Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, thought the Bill could be a candidate for carry over, with the delay that that entailed. So it is in this context that I come to consider the coalition Government's series of piecemeal Bills for constitutional reform.
	This is not the place for a detailed consideration of the issues that each raises but it should be noted that they are the product of a coalition agreement produced at speed over a number of days. They clearly represent both the cement to hold the coalition together and the desire to show a determination to get a legislative programme under way with speed and vigour-to hit the ground running, as the Prime Minister so often puts it. Each has been criticised, however, not only by the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution but by the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. The Commons committee regretted that the AV Bill was,
	"being pushed through Parliament in a manner that limits both legislative and external scrutiny of its impact, and may consequently undermine the Government's intention to restore the public's faith in Parliament".
	The committee said that for primarily political reasons the Bill links two sets of provisions which could have been considered separately and,
	"does not include proposals on reforming the House of Lords which would have allowed the composition of Parliament to be developed in the round.".
	The House of Lords Select Committee regarded it,
	"as a matter of principle that proposals for major constitutional reform should be subject to prior public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny. We recognise that there may exceptionally be good reasons for departing from this principle, but the perils of doing so are well illustrated in the present Bill. The case for proceeding rapidly with one Part of this Bill is far stronger than for the other".
	Both committees also censure the Fixed-Term Parliaments Bill in a similar way in respect of the speed, the lack of consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny.
	The report in the House of Commons said:
	"It is acutely disappointing to us that we have needed to criticise the Government for the process it has chosen to adopt in the passage of its first two constitutional Bills, the other being the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. While we understand the political impetus for making swift progress in this area, bills of such legal and constitutional sensitivity should be published in draft for full pre-legislative scrutiny, rather than proceeded with in haste. We intend to inquire very soon, in co-operation with the Procedure Committee if possible, into how proper pre-legislative scrutiny of such Bills can best be ensured in future, whether through the House's Standing Orders or otherwise".
	The reasons for pre-legislative scrutiny are of course obvious. Taking evidence and soundings allow arguments to be tested and developed. Issues which seem to be based on arbitrary opinions can be explored and explained. Consensus can be reached and alternatives discovered. In short, argument can be reduced to a smaller number of points and time can be saved.
	In this context, the procedures of each House are complementary, one to another. In the other place, as everyone knows, Programme Motions and guillotines mean that scrutiny is curtailed. In this House, the Government have no formal control over parliamentary time, and all amendments tabled must be called and debated. That is precisely what has been applauded by many Members of the other House. In the other place, Report and Third Reading are almost always taken on the same day. In the Lords, Report and Third Reading are nearly always taken on separate days, and amendments may be tabled and considered at Third Reading. Any suggestion that the procedures of this House should be adapted to model the other place would point a dagger at proper scrutiny, and yesterday's debate highlighted the very real and present danger.
	I conclude by saying that it should be axiomatic that every constitutional Bill be published in draft, consulted upon and subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny, with evidence being called and tested. Only the most exceptional circumstances should dictate otherwise, and there is none to justify the two Bills now before this House. In my view, gluing the coalition together for short-term political convenience and an early start on legislative programmes are not exceptional reasons. For the reasons I have given, many of the problems of the past few days could have been avoided if this process had been followed, and the issues hammered out by testing and looking at evidence to prove the propositions being put forward.
	By definition, it is unlikely that coalitions will produce joint policies which will have been the subject of identical but separate manifesto commitments. Those policies will not have received public endorsement. On the contrary, they will be a mix and match to bind the parties together in their desire to push forward with a legislative programme to seek to justify the creation of the coalition. That is perfectly understandable, but it is not an excuse and does not justify the promotion of constitutional Bills and claiming for them a special status that exempts them from proper consultation and scrutiny. To do otherwise would lead to all coalitions wanting to adopt a similar course, thereby doing enormous damage to Parliament and its task of full and proper scrutiny.

Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for introducing this extremely timely debate and enabling this House again to reflect in particular on the possible impact of coalition government on its deliberations. However, I take some issue with two assertions that she made, the first being that the coalition Government have a stranglehold on this House. It is very apparent from the proceedings on the Public Bodies Bill that the coalition has been able to dictate neither the content nor the timing of that deliberation. Indeed, there have been significant amendments passed by this House, against the wishes of the coalition, for the improvement and revision of the Bill.
	The second issue that the noble Baroness raised, which is also questionable, is that legislation of Government is legitimate-and I think that she was speaking here about constitutional legislation-only in so far as it is reflected in advance by the manifestos of the parties putting it forward. She admitted the exception to that rule, which occurred in the lifetime of her own Government-the Constitution Act, which dispensed with the role of the Lord Chancellor historically, separated the Judicial Committee from this House and set up the new Supreme Court. That cannot be an absolute rule, and it is not a desirable rule. Manifestos by their nature express broad goals and certainly not detailed methods of implementation of those goals. Furthermore, there are occasions when Parliament must move with a degree of rapidity to respond to situations. I think, for example, of the embarrassment of this House when certain of its Members were considered to have behaved in a manner totally inappropriate to their positions of responsibility. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, gave his advice on the responsibilities and capabilities of this House, but it was by no means an open-and-shut case, and it required a response to the circumstances. Some of the matters being considered for constitutional reform at this time would have been strengthened by prelegislative scrutiny. In that respect, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hart. It is not impossible for this House to express its views on these measures as they are presented to us.
	The second point that I would wish to make about the history of the coalition Government is that it is very easy to overlook, when one is concerned with what is admittedly a new situation in modern terms, the extent to which Cabinet Governments have not been monolithic, although they may have been single-party Governments. I go back as far as I can recall, to the Attlee Government. The Bevanites and Gaitskillites were in constant tension with each other. They were not reflecting on the manifesto; they were reflecting different ideologies and practical approaches to the achievement of their respective goals. There was always a tension. Similarly, there was a tension-and the Government of the day did not speak with one voice-when Barbara Castle published her document, In Place of Strife. A minority of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and Roy Jenkins, supported her.
	Within single-party Governments there are shifting alliances. Perhaps it may be considered that there is some attractiveness in the fact that in a coalition the differences of opinion are sometimes rather more clearly recognisable and understood and made more explicit. I hope that will be so. The coalition partnership agreement refers to that point in its foreword, written by the two leaders. It says:
	"So we will extend transparency to every area of public life".
	I very much hope that that includes transparency in respect of the work of the coalition Cabinet and of the two leaders themselves. Their position as a coalition will command greater public trust if it is recognised that the differences of opinion are real and that the contribution to debate is not one of parties entrenched and firing against each other but a genuine part of the democratic debate.
	We have had other examples of Government in which differences of opinion have been recognised in modern times-perhaps most notably in respect of the referendum on our membership of the European Union in which Tony Benn and his colleagues were permitted to speak out against the view of the majority of the Cabinet. That was a coalition in all but name. I prefer the version that we have now.
	The major issue raised by the coalition's existence is whether it will confront what was recognised before the election as the biggest problem about the British constitutional arrangements-the overmighty power of the Executive. The Better Government Initiative, created by a number of former civil servants, focused clearly on all that. To my mind, there is some opportunity here again to address those problems more easily in a coalition than in the autocratic single-party leadership that we have faced over quite a long period of the last generation. What will reinforce the public's trust is the sense of the Government being more deliberative and seeking properly to consult. That does mean having prelegislative scrutiny in constitutional Bills and putting out Green Papers to give the public a proper opportunity to debate and contribute their informed evidence on the issues under discussion. There have been good examples of this from the coalition, noticeably in the Green Paper that has come out about electricity, brought out by Mr Chris Huhne, which sets out what the issues are and how the Government's mind is moving and gives a proper timetable to enable reactions to come in. Similarly, the Minister of Justice, Mr Kenneth Clarke, brought out a first-class paper on penal matters. That allows the transparency that we require to know what the Government's thinking is about these issues and the opportunity to participate in the decision-making.
	The foreword to the coalition manifesto spoke of the time having come,
	"to disperse power more widely in Britain today".
	I am very much in agreement with that overriding rubric, but I hope that the agreement includes recognition of the power of Parliament in respect of the coalition, and that Parliament's dialogue with the Government will become more than advisory and will, indeed, be informative and creative.

Lord Wills: My Lords, I too congratulate and thank my noble friend for proposing this important and timely debate and, indeed, for her skilful analysis of all the issues. It is a pleasure to follow the important and thoughtful speeches that have been made, including the one we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan. I very much look forward to hearing the rest of this debate.
	Coalition government is a novelty in the recent history of this country but it is already becoming clear that it has significant constitutional and parliamentary effects. Some are inherent in the nature of coalition Governments; some are the result of the particular circumstances of this coalition Government. It is clear that these effects are likely to develop and evolve further in the months and years ahead.
	I want briefly to rehearse what seem to me to be some of the most significant effects so far of this coalition Government and then to make a suggestion to the Government on how they might respond. These are clearly uncharted constitutional waters. Parliamentary conventions, for example, that depend on the primacy of the manifesto commitment have been cast into doubt by a coalition agreement that has jettisoned election commitments made by one or other or both of the parties to the coalition agreement precisely in order to secure that agreement. I make no judgment on this, I simply remark on the fact. Again, the doctrine of collective responsibility has been called into question by the coalition agreement, which sunnily asserts that it continues to apply, except when it does not. In this House, again, for example-I will not dwell on this-we have seen how difficult this new world can be with the bitterly contested PVSC Bill.
	In the past, one important way that your Lordships' House has tackled contested and contentious legislation is through negotiation and compromise. But this Government-again, I make no judgment on this; I simply remark on the fact-have clearly found great difficulty in reaching for this solution with this Bill. I do not think that that is because these are unusually stubborn Ministers; rather, it seems to me to be a product of the origins of the Bill in the coalition agreement.
	We can all read daily in the media reports of deep unease among Back-Benchers in both parties to the coalition that their interests are somehow being sacrificed to those of the other party. This is inevitable when there is no history of co-operation between the two parties and there has not yet been any time for these parties to build up any real trust between them. This is only to be expected when a coalition has to be put together so quickly and unexpectedly.
	Such suspicions may be understandable but when the Bill yokes together two different political agendas, with Part 1 representing, as it were, the Liberal Democrat part of the Bill, and Part 2 the Conservative part, it makes it very difficult for the Government to adopt obvious solutions such as splitting the Bill into two and adopting different timetables for the two parts, which would remove a lot of the problems that we have seen over the past few days. Compromise in one part of the Bill but not the other would inevitably lead to significant unrest in the parliamentary party whose agenda had been compromised and would weaken the coalition. It is this, in my view, which helps account for the unusual inflexibility of the Government over the Bill. Again, I am not seeking to pass judgment but merely to understand what is going on here.
	Governments who are the product of a deal clearly find it difficult to do deals. It appears on the basis of this admittedly limited evidence base that if the deal that sets up a coalition is particularly rapid and pressurised, the more difficult it is for the Government to do a deal with the Opposition over legislation. As a result, there have been all-night sittings and passionate complaints from both sides of this House that the proper role of your Lordships' House has been sabotaged by the other side.
	I am sure that as today's debate continues we will hear further examples of the effects of this coalition Government but I conclude my remarks by making a suggestion to the Government about one way they could begin to respond to these new circumstances for our constitutional arrangements. The Government have not rushed to recognise that their formation raises significant constitutional issues. In so far as they have done so, it appears that their actions have been piecemeal and reactive. They have been making it up pretty much as they go along. Again, I am not seeking to criticise the Government. It is perhaps inevitable that that should be the case in the light of the general absence of significant constitutional discourse on these issues in our political culture and in our media. Nor do I think that this is axiomatically a problem. I have long believed that it is generally better to approach constitutional change rather as a physician healing what needs to be healed than as an engineer constructing radical new structures from a blueprint. However, there is much to be said for a systematic examination of these issues that places them in the broader context of the state of our constitution.
	Noble Lords have said that this may well not be the last coalition Government that we see in our lifetimes, and that the coalition is as much the product of political change as the cause of it. The politics of our democracy are clearly changing. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, set that out very well. The consequences of these changes need a properly informed debate that is not confined to the committee rooms of Westminster and Whitehall and should not necessarily be confined to the specific issues generated by the coalition Government. For example, how far would a move to a fully codified constitution help tackle these issues? Reference has been made to the Cabinet manual. That seems to me to be part of the creeping codification of our constitutional arrangements, and it should surely be scrutinised in the light of that wider debate. This debate should not be dictated by the Executive. It should start with the people whose constitutional arrangements we all seek to serve. Their views should be solicited through a range of mechanisms including deliberative exercises, such as citizens' summits, which should inform any policy formulation by the Executive before they present any proposals to the legislature.
	This discourse needs to start with a set of rigorously researched, independently validated propositions. At the risk of repeating myself from previous debates, these could be provided by the working group on the constitution established by the previous Government. That included distinguished and expert Members from all sides of this House-lawyers, prominent academics and others-but, despite repeated requests from me, the Government have still to convene it. I am unclear why the Government are so slow to do that. It is a modest proposal, not in the sense that Jonathan Swift meant a modest proposal but a genuine modest proposal. It is as much in the interests of the Government as of everyone else that our discussions on this issue should be informed by such expert deliberation.
	I would be grateful if when he winds up the Minister could give some indication of whether he will get this group-or a similar group; he does not have to accept it exactly as it was constituted by the previous Government-under way and, if he will, when. If the Government are not proposing to do that, I would be grateful if he could give some indication of why not.

Lord Goodhart: My Lords, some time between 5.30 and 6.30 yesterday afternoon, it became apparent to me that your Lordships' House had entered a serious constitutional crisis, and I have decided to make that the centre of my speech today.
	What has happened is that it has become apparent that a minority of the Members of your Lordships' House can use their power to block legislation that has been introduced by the Government and has been supported by a majority of your Lordships' House. The minority can do this by a large number of Members making speeches that are of great length and repetitive and by not accepting groupings. The only weapon now available to the majority of your Lordships' House in the battle that seems to be happening is closure, but that weapon was designed for other purposes and is not very efficient in stopping the tactics of the minority. In the long run, the House of Commons can, of course, overcome the blocking of Bills in your Lordships' House, but only by the use of the Parliament Act, and that means a delay of a year or more. The Parliament Act was created to allow the House of Commons to override decisions taken by the majority in your Lordships' House, not to deal with the actions of a minority. Having separate actions by a minority was, no doubt, hardly foreseen in 1911.
	The use of minority blocking has not previously been seen in your Lordships' House, at least during the 13 years during which I have been a Member. At the time of the debate on the House of Lords Bill in 1999, it was rumoured that the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury-then Lord Cranborne and the Conservative Leader-had persuaded the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, to agree to the retention of 92 hereditary Peers by a threat to upset future government timetables in your Lordships' House. Whether that would have happened if there had been no retention of hereditary Peers, I do not know, but that was a case that involved a majority and not a minority of the Members of your Lordships' House. The problem now is that the powers of a minority in the House have been displayed to all who may become interested. That could well apply to other legislation at a later date, and particularly to legislation for the reform of your Lordships' House, where some Members may well wish to frustrate or delay reform in all or some of its steps.
	Of course, the powers of minority decisions could go much wider than that. There could be frustration of almost anything. To my mind, the use of delaying tactics by a minority, whatever that minority may be, is damaging to the constitution and to the future of your Lordships' House. The Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, calls,
	"attention to the constitutional and Parliamentary effect of coalition government".
	I believe that this is not in fact the issue. The problems have been created by Labour-Party delaying tactics. Those delaying tactics could arise whether the majority was a single party or a coalition, so it is not the coalition that is the significant issue here-it is the Opposition, the Labour Party itself. The real issue is the behaviour of a minority Opposition.
	Some of the speeches made during the debate yesterday after the closure vote think that the problem can be settled for good by friendly negotiation. Negotiation is now undoubtedly desirable, but it is not enough for the future as a whole. The action of the Labour Party has, I believe, opened up possibilities which may well reappear later, perhaps to its own detriment. What can we do to meet this problem? For the present, it looks as if we have to leave the matters to negotiation, but for the longer term we are going to need legislation, which may have to be passed under the Parliament Act. We need that in your Lordships' House.
	I would hope that any such legislation would act in a way that prevents anything like we have been facing for the last couple of weeks happening again. It must not allow for the guillotine because it is central that we do not have a guillotine in your Lordships' House, and it must also prevent the misuse of time for debates. What has happened over the last two days is seriously damaging to the future of your Lordships' House and is something that is going to concern this House not just for the next few weeks, but for a very considerable time.

Lord Sewel: In making comparisons between what is happening now with what has happened in the past, has the noble Lord not excluded or failed to mention one very important factor? Now, the coalition Government have what is really an effective majority in your Lordships-an effective majority, not an arithmetical one-where the last Government were clearly in the minority? That is the very fundamental difference.

Lord Goodhart: My Lords, that is perfectly true. However, for centuries-for decades-before 1999, the Conservative Party had a clear majority in your Lordships' House.
	After 1999, or after 1997 perhaps, the then Prime Minister said-I think he was right-that the two largest parties should have an equal number of Members and the third party, which was, of course, my own, should have a proportionate share. The meaning of "proportionate" was never quite worked out. All that has happened here-and what happened between 1999 and now does not make any difference-is that two parties are on the side of the Government rather than two parties being on the side of the Opposition. We have to prepare for situations where one or both of these events may happen.
	I have said all that I intend to say. I hope that we will see something that will get us around the serious position we are now in. It will need very careful treatment to get us out of it.

Counterterrorism
	 — 
	Statement

Baroness Neville-Jones: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like to repeat a Statement made earlier today in another place by my right honourable friend Damian Green, the Minister of State for Immigration. The Statement is as follows:
	"Mr Speaker, the Home Secretary is currently in Budapest at an informal meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, and so I will be responding on her behalf.
	As the Home Secretary, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have made clear, the first duty of any Government is to protect the British public, and we will not do anything that puts our security at risk. The arrests of individuals for terrorism-related offences before Christmas, the cargo bomb plot in October and the bombings in Stockholm in December have all demonstrated that the threat from international terrorism remains a serious one.
	On 13 July last year, the Home Secretary announced that she was renewing the current order for 28 days' pre-charge detention for six months whilst the powers were considered as part of a wider review of counterterrorism powers. As the Home Secretary will be giving a full Statement to the House on Wednesday on the outcome of that review, it would be wrong of me to pre-empt her statement by giving details of the review today.
	This Government are clear that the power to detain terrorist suspects for up to 28 days' detention before they are charged or released was meant to be an exceptional power. This has always been Parliament's intention, but under the last Government it became the norm, with the renewal of 28 days repeatedly brought before the House. This was despite the power rarely being used; since July 2007, no one has been held for longer than 14 days despite the many terrorists arrested since then. This is a testament to the efforts of our prosecutors, our police and our intelligence agencies. As I said, the Home Secretary will next Wednesday announce to the House the findings from the wider review of counterterrorism and security powers.
	The Home Secretary will set out the detailed considerations of the Government in determining whether the current regime of 28 days should be renewed and, if not, what should be put in its place. In the interim, I can announce that the Government will not be seeking to extend the order allowing the maximum 28-day limit and, accordingly, the current order will lapse on 25 January and the maximum limit of pre-charge detention will from that date revert to 14 days.
	We are clear that 14 days should be the norm and that the law should reflect this. However, we will place draft emergency legislation in the House Library to extend the maximum period to 28 days to prepare for the very exceptional circumstances when a longer period may be required. If Parliament approved, the maximum period of pre-charge detention could be extended by that method. In our announcement on the wider review, the Home Secretary will set out what contingency measures should be introduced in order to ensure that our ability to bring terrorists to justice is as effective as possible.
	This country continues to face a real and serious threat from terrorism. That threat is unlikely to diminish any time soon. The Government are clear that we need appropriate powers to deal with that threat, but those powers must not interfere with the hard won civil liberties of the British people. There is a difficult balance to be struck between protecting our security and defending our civil liberties; the outcome of our counterterrorism powers review will strike that balance. It is this Government's sincere hope that it will form the basis of a lasting political consensus across the House on this fundamentally important issue".
	I commend the Statement to the House. That concludes the Statement.

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Private Notice Question in the other place as a Statement. However, it is disappointing that the Statement had to be dragged out of the Government by means of a PNQ this morning. When the Conservative Party was in opposition, it made much play of the need for the Executive to respect Parliament and parliamentary procedures. In office it has acted rather differently. I will return to that in a moment.
	Keeping the public safe and striking the right balance between security and protection of fundamental liberties is one of the most vital challenges facing any Government. As a responsible Opposition, we seek to support the Government on issues of national security and on their review of counterterrorism powers, provided that decisions are made on the basis of evidence, solely in the national interest and following an orderly process. That is still very much our intention. That is why we said before Christmas that if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days' pre-charge detention without impeding the police and security services in doing their job, we should do it.
	However, the process has not been at all orderly; it has been delayed considerably. It was to be completed after the summer Recess, then in November, then by the end of the year and then last week. During that time there have been considerable leaks to the media. On only 15 January, the Sun reported that £20 million of extra funding would be required for the security services to implement the changes to control orders, which were agreed as part of the Government's counterterrorism powers review. That was followed by detailed reports by the BBC and other newspapers last week. For example, the BBC reported the coalition plans to replace control orders with a new range of restrictions to keep terror suspects under surveillance. One working title for the new curbs, according to the BBC, is surveillance orders. These would restrict suspects' movements but end overnight curfews and a ban on mobile phones if numbers were supplied. The Daily Telegraph reported the following from political sources:
	"Curfews for terrorism suspects are to be abandoned as part of a government overhaul of control orders, it can be disclosed".
	There have been all these briefings and leaks in the media, but we are told today of the conclusions of the Government's review, as the noble Baroness has set out-of a reversion to 14 days and draft emergency legislation to be brought to extend the maximum period to 28 days in the circumstances that the noble Baroness described. We must, however, wait until next Wednesday for a full justification for this decision and the details; yet the powers to detain terror suspects for 28 days expire, as the noble Baroness has stated, next Monday. Why are we not receiving a full Statement today, before the reversion to 14 days? Have the police and the security services agreed that, on the basis of the evidence, the power to detain suspects beyond 14 days is no longer necessary? Will this evidence, if it is available, be published in the review outcome, which I assume with be published next Wednesday? Has the Minister's department established a leaks inquiry into the series of disclosures that we have seen in the media in the past few weeks?
	This party is determined to do everything that it can to support the Government in any appropriate and necessary national security measures. However, the Government's conduct on this matter has not given us any confidence in their approach.

Baroness Neville-Jones: My Lords, I welcome the Opposition's intention to support the Government so far as they can in this very important policy area. When the full Statement has been made and the review published, I hope they will feel able to support the Government's position and proposed legislation in their entirety.
	I will say something about the review. As the House would expect, I have been fully involved in it. The word I would use to describe what we have been doing is "painstaking". It has undoubtedly taken us longer than we thought it would. I make no apology for that. It is much more important to get the outcome right, get the balance right and go into all the possibilities. As we did the work, we found that there were more angles and aspects that we needed to consider than we had realised at the outset: otherwise, we would not have stated in public the timetable that we did. We have been at pains to do extremely careful work, and to ensure that all those involved in government agreed with the outcome. The Home Secretary will set this out in detail on Wednesday.
	The noble Lord asked a number of questions. I will endeavour to answer them. First, there will be a full Statement. The police and security services have made it clear that they are able to work within the limits that have been set. I do not wish to go into great detail because it would be wrong to anticipate the Statement. However, we will set out the considerations that lie behind the contingency that we will put in place because, like everyone else, we realise that the terrorist threat can change and therefore that it is right and proper to have an arrangement to enable us to respond to that, but with the sanction of Parliament. That will be one difference between the arrangements that we will put forward and those that were previously in place.
	There has undoubtedly been significant and considerable press speculation about what the Government were going to decide. I have no doubt that journalists talked to people. However, there has been no leak and no statement by the Government of a kind that anticipated what they were going to say to Parliament. It is in response to the Urgent Question put down in the other House that we have chosen to respond to the part of the CT review that is urgent-the part that relates to the expiry of the pre-charge detention period-and to make it clear that it is the Government's intention to allow the 28-day limit to lapse and to revert in normal circumstances to 14 days. The evidence since 2007 shows that this has been sufficient time for valid charges to be brought.

Lord Owen: Is the Minister aware that although there is no collective view on the Cross Benches, we on these Benches, after a very difficult period in which our civil liberties have been threatened by suggestions at one stage that this period could go up to 90 days, then to 48 days, will greatly welcome this decision by the coalition Government? It is a decision on which this House can claim to have had a considerable influence. It is also the end of a rather shameful period in which many of us feel that we reacted to the undoubted threat of terrorism, which was and remains great, by reducing our intrinsic and long-standing respect for civil liberties.

Baroness Neville-Jones: I am grateful to the noble Lord for his statement. This House has indeed striven to be a guardian of civil liberties, and many noble Lords have played an important part in that role. As a House, we shall always strive to do that with due regard to the security of this country.

Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, this is indeed welcome news. I welcome, too, the proposal to put forward draft emergency legislation. There may be other contexts in which having legislation on the stocks could be useful. I hope the Minister will take back the view, which I suspect not only I take, that it would be useful to have an opportunity to scrutinise the draft legislation and not simply publish it, leave it there and hope it is okay. There needs to be a formal opportunity to scrutinise it.
	On the 14 days, which will "be the norm", detention on the basis of suspicion for as long as 14 days is significant and must have an immense impact on an innocent individual. Has any progress been made on work, particularly intercept evidence-the noble Baroness will not be surprised by that question-that might enable a reduction to less than 14 days?

Baroness Neville-Jones: I thank my noble friend for her sentiments. On the 14 days, more detail will indeed be set out about the context in which 14 days will become the norm. Perhaps she will forgive me if I do not go into that now. Some of the detail will respond precisely to the points that she just made.
	I have no doubt that the Home Secretary will have something to say about the use of interceptors' evidence. All I will say to the House at the moment is that the work that is being done on that subject-and a new round of work is being done-is continuing.

Lord King of Bridgwater: My Lords, I apologise to the House for arriving late for my noble friend's Statement. As one of the survivors of the 90-day ping-pong between the Houses, when fortunately the robust position of so many of your Lordships at that time ensured that a very serious error was not made, I welcome the Statement that my noble friend has repeated today and look forward to further details that will emerge next Wednesday.

Baroness Neville-Jones: I thank my noble friend. In making the Statement on Wednesday, I hope that we will be able to give the full context in which the 14-day decision rests.

Coalition Government
	 — 
	Debate (continued)

Lord Addington: My Lords, we now continue with the debate. I apologise for the slight change in the speaking order between myself and my noble friend Lord Greaves. Communication between offices, particularly after last night, was not perfect. I hope that the House will forgive us for slightly confusing what is going on. It is also unusual to be speaking in a debate when most of the people you wish to address your remarks to have not made it back in. But, with perfect timing, the noble Baroness has arrived. That is quite understandable.
	The idea of the coalition and the constitutional settlement in this House has, as the noble Baroness rightly mentioned, been affected by what has happened over the past few days. I appreciate that I am biased when I make these remarks, but over the past few days we have heard a great many things a great many times. One is that we now have an iron majority on these Benches that can ram everything through. It is quite odd that a minute after we had our last big row on that, in which I had a small part, we then had a Government defeat inspired by a Government Back-Bencher. The Isle of Wight may not be an issue that will bring down Governments, but it proves that even under this new monolith of control, there is a degree of flexibility.
	Also, there is the fact that this House could change things quite happily. Before there was a balance, which I do not always regard as having been the sunny uplands, having spent so much of it sitting over there and voting against the now Opposition party. Sometimes we found ourselves struggling to be heard; sometimes our current partners in the coalition did not agree with us; sometimes we found ourselves being the major opposition on Bills. There were changes going on, and a situation that was rather more dynamic than has been painted.
	It was nice to hear the noble Lord, Lord Wills, speak for only eight minutes and make a coherent point. I hope that many of the people in this House will take on board the fact that you can do things efficiently and well.
	If we are going to try to make this House work, we will have to take a long hard look at ourselves and how things function. I feel that various political parties have a habit of forgetting about their opponents and putting them in certain boxes, based on the last time they had a look at them. The last time that happened with the party opposite was sometime in 1997. I remember on one occasion about two years ago when I was here at about 10.30 at night having a drink that had been bought for me by a Member of the now Opposition. It was suggested to me and another of my colleagues that all we really wanted was to keep the Tories out-those were the exact words. "That's what you really want". As that Member of what is now Her Majesty's Opposition had bought me a drink I did not rant and rail there and then, but the fact that I was there at 10.30 at night to vote against that Government should have been some indication that we were not going to welcome them with open arms on every single occasion. A slight hint had been given by our behaviour. That is something which people should bear in mind.
	If we are going to continue with this debate, we must bear these things in mind-the fact that we do have a right to form alliances and coalitions; the fact that behaviour in this House will be affected by them; and the fact that if people are appointed to this Chamber for life, it will lead to time lags and blocks. If we are worried about how this Chamber functions, we must look at having periodical culls. I speak as a hereditary Peer who has felt the breath of the whetted axe at least once. I have voted for reform in this House; I have admitted to doing it with gritted teeth, but I did it. We are going to have to look at reform.
	The fact of the matter is that it has been proven, or the House has been reminded, that a small group can delay things. Whether it was a filibuster or not does not really matter. Travelling at the speed of an arthritic snail amounts to the same thing, particularly on this occasion. If we are going to continue in this role, we will have to look at our own procedures. I do not like the idea very much but we do have a rather blunt instrument available to us at the moment-and I put my hand up as being a Teller when it was used. We must either accept its use more regularly or, if this behaviour continues, we must give the power to someone else. Alternatively, we must have a self-denying ordinance that we do not incessantly delay procedures. Unless these things are talked about, the nature of this Chamber will change.
	Many of my noble friends have spoken about the nature of politics and the noble Baroness put great emphasis on what goes into manifestos. I can tell you one thing about the coalition document for my own party-and I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, might agree with me. We did not sit down and talk about the subtext that we would have to present to the Government if we did not win, if we came second. We assumed we were going to win. Maybe we were being very arrogant. Maybe the party that lost, when it wrote its manifesto on the basis that it was going to win, was being a little arrogant. Maybe the party that came best out of all the people who did not quite win was being arrogant. But we all did it. Unless you are going to make us go away and rewrite our manifestos and come back later, we are going to have to accept that they are guidelines and principles as opposed to a shopping list of what you are actually going to do.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, could the noble Lord explain why the Secretary of State at DBIS, Mr Cable, said that he would never have signed the pledge on tuition fees had he known that he was going to be in Government? How does he square those two things up?

Lord Addington: My Lords, I do not know if I can really explain that. Maybe it is part of the learning process, one that we will have to take on the chin. I put it like this. When tuition fees were first introduced by the noble Baroness's party, I opened a bank account for my daughter to pay her tuition fees. I looked to what was coming and listened to the academics, who were lobbying very hard for increases even then, saying that the fees were too low. That was what I thought the reality was. My own party made other judgments, and they were not ones I agreed with.
	To conclude, this House is going to have to learn to behave slightly differently, or bring in an outside authority, if we cannot behave ourselves and take our practices from another place, which are determined by an outside authority. We will have to accept that we as a House are stuck with our history, which means that we are here for life at the moment, and there is always going to be a time lag, and we cannot change our membership with elections.

Lord Plant of Highfield: My Lords, I shall focus, as my noble friend Lady Symons did at the beginning of her speech-and I thank her for inaugurating this debate-on the issues of manifestos and mandates in the context of coalition. Over the past generation at least, the party manifesto at elections has become rather akin to a quasi-contract between government and the electorate. It is clear why that should have happened. What is often called in the literature expressive voting, which is what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, meant when he talked about people having a kind of loyalty to a party that they have grown up with and which is linked to social position, religious outlook and class, has declined tremendously in favour of what has come to be called instrumental voting, whereby people vote for parties in relation to how they see their interests at a particular time.
	A manifesto might be a way of trying to address the issue of instrumental voting, so that people look at what they will get out of a Government, whether it is in their interests and so forth. The fact that there is a manifesto provides a basis for building up a degree of trust between the electorate and the Government. Acting on the manifesto provides the Government with their mandate and authority. That idea reached its zenith, for good or ill, in 1997, with the Labour Party's pledge card, which was very much promoted by my noble friend Lord Prescott. Indeed, all the pledges were fulfilled. That card was an attempt to forge a link between government and people in a narrow sense but also in terms of what the Government could be held to account to do and trusted to do.
	The doctrine of the manifesto and the mandate becomes intensely problematic in a post-election coalition deal. The coalition agreement, according to Mr Vince Cable, superseded the manifestos of the two separate parties, but there is then a question of legitimacy, when some features of the coalition agreement were not part of either party's manifesto.
	The counterargument to that has been that a coalition Government in these circumstances may claim legitimacy because they are governing in the national interest. Okay, nobody voted for that coalition and nobody voted for that coalition agreement, but it still might be claimed that they are legitimate. This is a controversial claim, just as what is in the national interest is a controversial topic. In saying that they are legitimate because they are governing in the national interest, the Government are judge and jury in their own case, as they determine the national interest.
	The second alternative justification is that the electorate voted for a hung Parliament or coalition. This is a rather difficult claim to justify. You only need to read John Stuart Mill on the fallacy of composition to see how fallacious that kind of argument is. Certainly, you cannot attribute or impute to the electorate an intention to do any such thing. It is an outcome of millions of individual intentional acts, all of which were perhaps undertaken for quite different reasons, so you cannot do that.
	The issue of how to legitimatise a post-election coalition brings us back to the issue of its mandate. This means that, for this Government, we must just say, "We are where we are. It is not ideal, but this is what we have got". It seems that we must be much more careful and deliberate in future coalition formation. If swing parties such as the Liberal Democrats-third or fourth parties-are going to claim legitimacy for coalition deals that they might subsequently make, they will have to be clear before an election who their preferred coalition partner is.
	The idea of equidistance, which the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, argued for when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats, is not sustainable in an election campaign. Given that there has been this coalition, it is just not going to be feasible for Liberal Democrats to say in future that they are equidistant between the other parties and will make some coalition deal after the election in the light of how things turn out and what their interests are. The Liberal Democrats will have to commit themselves in advance at least to the idea that, other things being equal, this party rather than that party is the preferred coalition partner. That links to the issue of legitimacy. It is only if a party such as the Liberal Democrats do that that people can choose to vote for or against that preferred coalition, rather than its being the result of a post-election deal of the sort that we have now. That will be an important element of any future coalition. Equidistance is just not a feasible or morally legitimate position, because it perpetrates a kind of sleight of hand on the electorate.
	The other problem with coalition in this country is that we have only the Liberal Democrats as a plausible third-party coalition partner. In other countries, there is a wider range of choices. Certainly, if the AV referendum is successful, I hope that there might emerge other possible swing parties. The Greens might be the most obvious; the nationalist parties might be, too, if they saw that there was a benefit in developing more United Kingdom-oriented policies as opposed to just pursuing a narrower, nationalist agenda. It seems to me that in those circumstances it is not going to appear all that acceptable to the British people to have a party, whichever it might be-it would be the Liberal Democrats in the circumstances that I am outlining-that receives a minority vote but is almost permanently in government as a swing party and in a position to join a coalition. There should have to be at least the opportunity for some kind of competition for the position of being a partner in a coalition and I hope that that will emerge over time. Overall, I am arguing that we should, if possible, avoid what happened this time with the post-election deal.

Lord Marlesford: I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. What he said sounded very interesting, but I simply did not understand it. He said that he felt that there should be some sort of competition. What did he mean by that?

Lord Plant of Highfield: If the AV referendum goes through, more people may well vote Green or for the nationalist parties and so on, and it may well be that over a number of elections other parties will rise up the electoral ladder so that they can, as a minority party, be in competition with the Liberal Democrats. At the moment, the Liberal Democrats are the only feasible coalition partner that we can envisage in ordinary circumstances. However, if AV came about, other parties might grow sufficiently strong to be potential coalition partners. That is all I meant and I am sorry if I did not articulate it very well.
	The thrust of what I am saying is that I think that it will be much better for the legitimacy of any future coalition to avoid purely post-election deals which would arise out of the third party claiming to be equidistant between the two major parties competing for government. That is bound to lead to questions about the legitimacy of the coalition-making process and the sort of document that we have at the moment, which, according to the Business Secretary, supersedes any of the manifestos. I think that that is highly unfortunate and that we need to be much more explicit with the electorate about those with whom deals are going to be made.

Baroness Verma: My Lords, perhaps I may remind Back-Benchers that there is a limit of 10 minutes on speeches.

Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow-although it is a bit of a surprise to do it so quickly-the noble Lord, Lord Plant of Highfield, a graduate of the University of Hull. Unfortunately, another Hull graduate, my noble friend Lord Cormack, is unable to be with us to make his maiden speech today. He is presently recovering in hospital. I shall not follow on from the noble Lord's comments but I thought that he made an extremely stimulating contribution.
	There are two aspects to looking at the constitutional dimension of coalition government. There is the formation of the coalition and the policy agreed as a consequence of parties forming a coalition. On the first, following what the noble Baroness said in opening the debate, it is important to stress the unique situation in which we find ourselves. We have had hung Parliaments before, resulting in minority government. We have had coalitions before, but not as a consequence of an indecisive election. In the 20th century, coalition Governments existed for a total of 18 years, but for 15 of those the Conservative Party could have governed as a majority Administration.
	The invitation by David Cameron to the Liberal Democrats to enter into negotiations led to a series of events for which there was no precedent. In many respects, the lessons to be learnt were learnt from practice elsewhere as much as from our own history. As has been touched upon, the process was informed by a draft chapter for an intended Cabinet manual, modelled on what exists in New Zealand. One could argue also that drawing up a coalition agreement followed practice adopted elsewhere. Where we differed from practice elsewhere was in the speed with which a new Government were formed. The process was slow by UK standards but rapid by international ones.
	In the time available, I shall touch upon three aspects already mentioned in the debate: the draft Cabinet manual, the coalition agreement and the Salisbury convention. The last two are inextricably linked and lead to a consideration of how Parliament treats constitutional measures embodied in the coalition agreement.
	The draft Cabinet manual now covers the situation in which no one party achieves an overall majority. It is designed to create the framework for the resolution of negotiations. At paragraph 49, it states:
	"Where a range of different administrations could potentially be formed, the expectation is that discussions will take place between political parties on who should form the next Government".
	This takes us beyond description of a political decision to a constitutional precept. It says that discussions "will take place", not that they may take place. This is not only questionable as a statement of practice but, if maintained, could give rise to legal challenge.
	It is not intended that the manual should have any legal effect, but a political party excluded from discussions, even if there is no realistic chance of it being part of a coalition, could conceivably seek judicial review of the process on the basis of what is stated in the manual. This gives rise to wider questions about not only the legal status of the manual but also the extent to which it embodies statements of practice, and statements of what civil servants understand to be the constitutional position-in effect, between statements grounded in precedent and those that are not. This takes us wider than coalition formation. Given that, I do not wish to stray on to these matters, but rather invite my noble friend the Leader of the House to indicate if time may be found to discuss the draft manual. I think there is value in discussing before, and not simply after, it has become a Cabinet manual.
	I turn to the coalition agreement. As we have heard, this occupies an unusual position as it is a post-election agreement-in effect, a post-election manifesto. It differs from election manifestos in two respects. In one respect, it is stronger; there are key provisions to which both parties are committed, and delivery is therefore central to maintaining the coalition. In the other respect, it is weaker in that it does not have the endorsement of the electorate. The agreement sanctions behaviour that is constitutionally distinct, though not without precedent: for example, allowing one party to abstain on a measure embodied in the agreement and, as a consequence, suspending the convention of collective responsibility for those Ministers in the abstaining party.
	That distinctive status brings me to the position of this House. There are two consequences. One is in relation to numbers. A coalition of two parties necessitates certain changes in procedures and practice. It has been claimed-we have heard it today-that the numbers also create a majority for the coalition in the House, running counter to the principle, though possibly not yet a convention, that no one party should have a majority in the House. That is not correct, either on paper or in practice. Up to the Christmas Recess, there had been 31 Divisions in the House. The Government lost nine of them, including one on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. They would still not have triumphed in all those had all the recently announced Peers been introduced, so I set aside that claim.
	What is of importance constitutionally is the implication for the Salisbury convention. As has been noted, the convention rests on the Salisbury/Addison agreement of 1945, essentially updating the thesis advanced by the third Marquess of Salisbury regarding the mandate. The basis on which the convention was advanced has long been spent but the convention has been maintained. There is some imprecision about the convention, in itself no bad thing because it allows for some flexibility and because a rigid application is not in my view compatible with a Conservative view of what constitutes "the people".
	As my noble friend Lord Wakeham observed, the convention has in practice been extended, as the Cunningham committee reported, to Bills included in the Government's programme for the Session. We therefore do not vote against a government Bill on Second Reading. That practice in many respects protects the status of this House as a revising Chamber. We do not normally challenge the ends of a measure approved by the other place but we focus on the means. We engage in detailed scrutiny; that is our strength and our justification. We are here to probe and improve legislation, not to attempt to deny its passage, other than in the most exceptional circumstances. Exceptional circumstances may arise-Lord Simon of Glaisdale sought to adumbrate what these may be in an interesting debate that he initiated in 1993-so that we need to retain what is, in essence, a reserve power.
	The Salisbury convention is relevant for present circumstances, and here I bring my points together. The constitutional Bills brought forward by government do not necessarily have their genesis in the manifesto of the winning party. Indeed, as the noble Baroness said, there is no single winning party. The fact that measures derive from a post-election agreement, one constructed in some haste and producing some measures introduced in haste, places a particular burden on this House to subject Bills to rigorous scrutiny. My view is that the circumstances therefore dictate two levels of scrutiny. One is our usual rigorous scrutiny of measures that are not of constitutional significance, and for measures that are, we must employ an enhanced level of scrutiny.
	I listened with considerable interest to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Hart and Lord Wills. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hart, I am a member of the Constitution Committee. I was the first chairman of the committee, and we produced a report on the process of constitutional change. We need, as a House, to revisit the means by which we examine constitutional Bills. It may not require a commission of the sort proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wills-I believe I am one of those scheduled to be on it-but we need, in effect, to draw together and confirm, as a House, the principles developed by the Constitution Committee, as detailed by the noble Lord, Lord Hart. I believe that the Constitution Committee has already done an admirable job in its examination of Bills of constitutional significance and in alerting the House to concerns it has about those measures. We need to build on that to achieve an agreed framework for examination. We need to play to our strengths. In some respects, we are getting there; in other respects we are not. We should be prepared, as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde put it in his 1999 Politeia lecture, to insist on our right to scrutinise, amend and improve legislation.
	In terms of detailed scrutiny under our existing procedures, I offer proceedings on the Public Bodies Bill as an example of good practice and proceedings on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill as an example of bad practice. I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, says, but I believe that it is not too late for an outbreak of common sense on both sides to prevent the creation of conditions which will be to the long-term detriment of this House and therefore to the quality of legislative scrutiny. On the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, I believe that the will of the House was expressed eloquently last night by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and I trust that both Front Benches will act on the basis of what he said. This is not the time for finger pointing. It is a time for maturity on both sides, and the House should expect that.
	This House is a Chamber of experience and expertise. It complements the other place. At times, Members must be prepared to put this House, and the health of our constitution, ahead of any tribal loyalties. There is a higher good than party, and it is essential that this House works, as a House, to fulfil the tasks detailed by my noble friend. As he said in his lecture, that right to scrutinise, amend and improve is also this House's purpose and its duty.

Lord Morgan: My Lords, that great man Benjamin Disraeli is renowned for two famous observations, both of which are being confirmed by the present Government. The first is that this country is divided into two nations, the rich and the poor-we have seen that confirmed-and the second is that England does not love coalitions, which is a view that has been confirmed in recent opinion polls, not to mention by the good people of Oldham and Saddleworth.
	We have had three peacetime coalitions of Liberals and Conservatives in this country in recent times, and they have all been catastrophic. The coalition of 1895 dragged us into the Boer War and presided over the death of 27,000 Boer women and children in concentration camps. The coalition of 1918 took us into the Black and Tans period in Ireland and into the depression of the interwar years. Under the 1931-32 coalition, the social consequences of that depression got much worse. However one evaluates their effect on the country, the effect on the Liberal Party was particularly calamitous. The 1918-22 coalition saw the party divide into two and it ended the front-rank careers of both Asquith and Lloyd George; today, coalition still produces certain anomalies. It is rather striking to compare the fate of Lord Addison-Dr Addison was sacked in 1921-and Dr Cable, who was demoted in the recent past. The two are similar in many ways, except that I am not aware that Addison had any skill at ballroom dancing. The 1931-32 coalition provides an even clearer analogy, because it produced the famous and notorious "agreement to differ". The agreement to differ over free trade saw the Liberals resign en masse, with the effect that they were no longer a party credibly of opposition let alone of government.
	Such coalitions have led to constitutional anomalies, and both the 1918 coalition and the current coalition have affected your Lordships' House in fundamental ways. The 1918 coalition attempted to flood the House of Lords through the sale of honours-the work of my countryman, David Lloyd George-and the current coalition has seen not the sale of honours but the creation of a large number of new Peers to enhance the already very strong majority that the Government have. As I have mentioned, in 1931 we saw the agreement to differ, with the Liberal Ministers resigning; now we have the agreement to differ over the views that will be taken in the referendum.
	The current coalition is significantly different, though, as my noble friend Lady Symons observed in her admirable speech, because it is scarred by its origins in a deeper way than the earlier coalitions. The coalition of 1918 was scarred by the coupon-the private pact between the Conservatives and the Liberals to share out the seats in an arbitrary and vindictive way. The 1931 coalition was scarred by rumours of its originating in a bankers' ramp-the private negotiations between politicians and bankers and perhaps people at the courts. The current coalition, again, is the product of a private negotiation. It is not the result of what David Lloyd George called the greater size of the people but the result of a secret conclave. Unlike in 1918 and 1931, the outcome was a Government for which no one has voted. The current coalition has arisen not openly through the popular will but privately through secret manoeuvres.
	As has been said by previous speakers, including the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, the earlier coalitions were all formed before an election, so people knew what they were getting. There was a coalition manifesto in 1918 and also in 1931. In 1918, 5 million people voted for Lloyd George's coalition; in 1931, 13 million people voted for Ramsay MacDonald's coalition; no one, however, voted for the coalition that we have today. Indeed, many people voted Liberal Democrat on the basis of the avowals of that party that voting Liberal Democrat was the way to keep the Tories out of office, so we have this anomalous backdrop to the Government as a result
	The implications for Parliament are quite numerous and have been broadly spelled out already. The Government have no clear manifesto. That is not the same as the divisions that might exist within parties. The Gaitskellites and the Bevanites adhered to the same manifesto in 1951 and 1955; on this occasion, there was no manifesto. That means that fundamental questions can be asked, as my noble friend Lord Plant observed, about the legitimacy of the Government. It certainly means that the Salisbury convention no longer has any meaning.
	Incidentally, I am delighted that the convention is called the Salisbury/Addison convention. I wrote a life of Lord Addison, so I am glad that he has had his mead of fame at last. However, it is worth pointing out, given that the Government's programme of reforms is said to be the greatest since 1832, that the Great Reform Act 1832 followed two general elections, in which it was clear what people were voting for, even with the limited franchise that existed then.
	Secondly, as we have said, the Government have no mandate. They rest their authority not on a programme presented to the electors, but on something called a coalition agreement. The Liberal Democrats manifesto spoke of moderate financial cuts on Keynesian lines, not increasing VAT and making PR an essential precondition of Government. The Liberal Democrats also declared against an increase in tuition fees, on which, as we know, candidates made a pledge. The coalition agreement has imposed immediate swingeing cuts in public expenditure and the welfare state, raised VAT, offered an electoral proposal on AV-a policy of neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats-and raised tuition fees while cutting university spending by 80 per cent. That does not add to the credibility or the honour of the political process in this country or to the honour of the Mother of Parliaments.
	Thirdly, I will refer to two other points that I do not think have been mentioned. The Ministers that Parliament confronts are not Ministers chosen by the Prime Minister and are not part of a familiar team who campaign in the country but the product of private manoeuvres between two sets of party managers. Ministers are chosen not necessarily for their experience or their suitability for office but because of the demands of the managers of the coalition. That is the kind of thing that has led to the disapprobation of Parliament in countries such as Italy.
	Finally, it seems to me that civil servants now have a different kind of role. They serve not only the Cabinet but a coalition committee or committees that are designed not to govern the country but to maintain proper relationships between two parties with significantly different outlooks. One might also say that, within the two parties, there are different outlooks, given that the Liberal Democrats have, on the one hand, right-wing Liberal Democrats such as David Laws and Danny Alexander who are of the type that contributed to The Orange Book and, on the other, more traditional social democrats whose affinity is with the Labour Party.
	The coalition has created great difficulties for Parliament. It has been harmful to democracy, it has no popular will behind its formation, and it has no obvious doctrine of collective responsibility to keep it together. The strange pattern that is being offered to the electorate is very similar to that of 1918-22, when there was no amalgamation of the parties at the grass roots and the Liberals and Conservatives who supported the coalition were, in a sense, in partnership and in rivalry at the same time, with very different rival interpretations of what might happen at the next general election. The coalition is a monument not to parliamentary sovereignty or popular sovereignty but to the connections of an ingrained political class. I once wrote of Gladstone as "the people's William"; I would now say to the people's Benjamin, "Come back, all is forgiven".

Lord Owen: My Lords, the circumstances in which this Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition came into existence need to be recalled. It was against a very serious financial crisis, a large structural fiscal deficit and a feeling in the country that, as a result of the negotiations, we had to have a Government which would, first, carry conviction in international markets-their first challenge, which they met very successfully-and, secondly, start to deal with the structural fiscal deficit. They have started on that and I hope the jury is out, certainly among economists, as to whether they have moved too swiftly and too harshly or whether they have judged the situation correctly and that it will be proven in the next year or two.
	So I think we can be generous to the coalition for its primary task, which was responding to the financial challenge facing the country. Where it seems to me that the coalition went wrong was in its private negotiations, and it is about the crux issues which we are facing. The House is now considering two Bills in this Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. One deals with changing the voting system and the other deals with changing the constituencies. Both are highly sensitive in politics, and we should recognise that because it is at the root of who wins the next general election. The other constitutional Bill, the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, is crucial to it. It has not yet been debated in this House, but we need to understand that five years allows for the changes to the constituencies, and that is the essence of why five years has been chosen. Four years would have been running it very tight.
	It is helpful and pleasing that the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition in this House are here today. We all know that we are now into negotiations. I welcome those negotiations, and I must say that I am not shocked. I did not participate-I am too old to participate in all-night sittings-but I am a veteran of all-night sittings in the other place, and we all know perfectly well that it is when you go through the Lobbies at three or four o'clock in the morning that you start to question why you are there. We also know that it has often been the case that-as a result of using the power of delay, the strongest power in a democracy-negotiations are forced and common sense comes about. So I wake up each morning to wonder whether your Lordships are all sitting, and I was not sure that this debate would even take place. I am therefore not at all shocked by it, and I hope that wiser heads will prevail.
	May I offer a few possible solutions? The previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is not often given enough credit for some of the things he has done. In the negotiations, he offered the Liberal Democrats a solution to their real problem, which is their aim to change the voting system. He offered them a three-option referendum: first past the post, the alternative vote-which his party at that time was keen on-and proportional representation. Effectively, as I understand it, if they had waited long enough to hear the detail of the negotiation, they could have chosen the system. They would presumably have made a choice between AV-plus-the recommendation of the Jenkins commission-and STV, which most of them preferred, but they may well have thought they had less chance of getting that through. It was a perfectly rational offer.
	The other negotiation was over AV and first past the post. The mistake was to offer a referendum on this basis, because that is taking a party-political fix into a referendum. That is not legitimate. If you wish to have this issue resolved by referendum-which I personally think is good and right, as I do not think it should be forced by a party fix-then the people must be given a proper choice, and a proper choice should include the third option of proportional representation. It is a democratic disgrace that we in this House, it seems, are incapable of bringing this about. We already have had an amendment discussed. At the moment, the indications are there is no chance of getting this through this House, and I cannot understand why.
	The best solution would be if the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister came to their senses and offered a proper referendum choice-a three-part choice. That is the democratic solution. If they do not do this, this House will then face another question: should we do what was done in 1978 and put in a threshold of legitimacy?
	I looked up that famous debate when the House of Commons decided that there had to be a 40 per cent threshold for Scottish devolution. I am glad to say that I did not vote, so there is no embarrassment; however, there is no doubt that it was premature. I supported Scottish devolution-I am a long-standing supporter-but in 1979 it did not have the wholehearted consent of the British people, and certainly not in Scotland. In retrospect that extra 21 years after which there was the wholehearted consent of the Scottish people on the referendum was time well spent. We need to be very careful. It seems quite wrong to have a referendum limited to AV and first past the post and run the very distinct possibility of an extremely low poll because it has been forced through.
	I then come to the second compromise area. Why are we forcing it through? There is going to be a five-year fixed-term and the Liberal Democrats in my view have made a historic misjudgment. They had the opportunity to demonstrate the coalition's worth to the people of this country. If they had only been careful and waited, say, three years, during which time they might have seen an economic recovery for which they would deservedly get benefit and three years of a successful coalition, and I think they would have won the referendum, even if just confined to AV. However, by insisting that it coincides with the May elections it is very likely to coincide with a period of massive unpopularity. The compromise will not change this, but the compromise would be to fix the date of the referendum by regulation in the legislation. Again, this is practical common sense. Who wants to fix a date for a referendum-which they want to win-effectively a year in advance, without any knowledge of what public opinion was likely to be? That was the fundamental mistake. I suspect the Conservative Party and the present Prime Minister gave the Deputy Prime Minister what he wanted and let him choose-it is his issue and the Prime Minister does not agree with it anyhow. This is the nub of the issue, although you may, in negotiations, deal with lots of other issues, and there comes the question for the future.
	There is no doubt that pre-legislative committees have proved themselves. They ought to be mandatory on constitutional questions and I think the sooner we make that change the better. If we choose to use referendums-and to be honest, we choose to use them usually when it is a big issue and the parties are divided among themselves-it would be a very good thing to give the Electoral Commission a locus on the legitimacy of the question, not just on the wording. It is illegitimate to have a referendum that is not a fair choice of options for the British people.
	Then we come to the whole question of how we handle the other various issues. We had three successive contributions from constitutionalists and historians, if I can put that way. The noble Lord, Lord Plant, very accurately said that the manifesto has become a quasi-contract. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, expressed his belief in the value of pre-legislative committees and the value of negotiations, which, all together, are crucial. We also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, about the history of the way coalitions work. We have a lot to learn about coalitions and need to pace ourselves. A coalition Government coming about in the circumstances of the present time need a little more modesty.
	I end by asking if anyone thinks that the Health and Social Care Bill-two volumes, double the size of the Bill that brought in the National Health Service-is not, in the words of the head of the NHS Confederation, a revolution; or, in the words of the Conservative MP for Totnes, herself a GP, that the Government have not tossed a hand grenade into PCT-land. This, in my view, is a Bill that has no mandate and no possible area of support from the parties that are now forming a coalition. They should think about that as well.

Lord Howarth of Newport: My Lords, the coalition was formed of two parties, neither of which won the confidence of the people at the general election. The manifesto of neither party was endorsed. The coalition agreement is an important document, but it does not have the status of a manifesto and is not holy writ in that sense. In these political conditions, we would expect humility, even diffidence, on the part of the Government. Of course the country needs decisive and effective government-it always does-but it is reasonable to expect, as the people of this country do, that the approach of a coalition Government should be consultative and consensual.
	I acknowledge that the country welcomed the coalition. There has been a great dislike of adversarial politics in the country and many people were delighted to see what they took to be an outbreak of courtesy and a new spirit of co-operation between political parties. The problem has been that that courtesy and co-operation have not been extended to the parties not in government. The magnanimity of the coalition parties appears to have been exhausted in five days of negotiation last May.
	Of course, our constitutional tradition leads to an expectation that the Opposition in Parliament will challenge, interrogate and hold the Government to account. I am not arguing that in a hung Parliament there should be parliamentary ecumenism. However, given the vast powers that our system of the Executive in Parliament provides, there is also always a constitutional expectation that Governments will act with some self-restraint. Where there has been no electoral endorsement of a Government, it would be all the more proper for the coalition to act with restraint. It has a duty to govern, but it has no entitlement to implement a radical programme. As always, but more so, a coalition Government without an electoral mandate have a duty to consult and to proceed as far as possible by agreement.
	So far from that, however, this coalition has the bit between its teeth and is driving a radical legislative programme through Parliament in a raging hurry. The coalition did not win, but it is taking all. It is immoderate. It is insisting on enacting policies that were not only not endorsed at the election but were not even exhibited to electors at the general election. Some policies, such as reform of the National Health Service, about which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, spoke, are doctrinaire and reckless. I agree with him that that policy is not legitimate. It is certainly not legitimate for the coalition to pursue this legislative programme given the background of the conditions in which it came into office. The reform was not even in the coalition agreement, the so-called Coalition Agreement for Stability and Reform. Where do we see the coalition's concern for stability?
	It is interesting to contrast the approach of the coalition with the approach of the Obama Administration. The policies of President Obama were presented at length to voters across the United States during the presidential campaign and led to massive electoral endorsement. However, President Obama in office has proceeded consultatively; he has sought to build consensus; he has always been willing to compromise; and he has always been reasonable. In his remarkable speech in Tucson, he reproached the intransigents in modern politics. That is a speech that not only the Leader of the House but the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister would do well to read and reflect on.
	Here, by contrast, the coalition received no electoral endorsement, but has it proceeded to build consensus or been willing to compromise? Where have been the Green Papers? What preliminary debate has it inaugurated before moving to implement policy? Where has been the pre-legislative consultation about which my noble friend Lord Hart of Chilton and a number of other noble Lords have spoken? For example, we are seeing the coalition exploit the constitution in their extreme and reckless approach to reducing the fiscal deficit. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, was overgenerous to the coalition on that score. To take public sector demand out of the economy on a substantial scale when one in five young people is unemployed and to remove the Future Jobs Fund, the policy intended to mitigate that disaster, is hardly likely to lead to appreciation of our parliamentary system or loyalty to the constitution among this generation of young people. No one disputes that the deficit needs to be reduced, but we are not seeing pragmatic policy on the economy within an intellectual consensus; we are seeing an ideological crusade against the state, dressed up in a spurious rationale of crisis and masquerading as fiscal responsibility.
	The coalition is set to exploit its exceptional dominance of both Houses of Parliament to marginalise elective local government. Britain's excessively centralised government is to be made more centralist still. In the drive to see more free schools and academies created, elective local education authorities are to be swept aside, exacerbating a baleful tendency over recent decades to reduce the role of local government. The Localism Bill has very worrying implications for local democracy, that important part of our constitution. In higher education, we have seen the coalition take it upon itself to triple student fees, which of course has led to a stirring of national resentment, to extra-parliamentary resistance and to much damage to trust in politics and our constitutional processes.
	We are seeing an abuse of the constitution. The doctrines of winner takes all and the omnicompetence of Parliament have always seemed to me to be dubious, but not only is what we are seeing improper constitutionally, but it is also foolish. Bold propositions on the part of the Government are fine, but crude imposition of policy is wrong and alienates the consent on which our system of parliamentary government is predicated. The coalition would be wiser to allow full public debate. In the process of that, it would be able to discern what is special pleading, what is merely defence of vested interests, what is timid orthodoxy and, on the other hand, where the genuine dangers lie. It would allow assent to grow where its propositions proved genuinely persuasive. But that is not the character of this coalition.
	The implications of coalition parliamentary government in our time may be disastrous. We are seeing a torrent of constitutional legislation, unheralded, unauthorised by the people at the election and timetabled so that scrutiny in the House of Commons is cursory and scrutiny in the House of Lords is under severe threat. The constitution is not a toy to be played with by the Liberal Democrats while the Conservatives gratify themselves in other policy areas.
	The problem is being seen particularly vividly, as many noble Lords have noted, in your Lordships' House at the moment. The struggle over the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill is a struggle over the future of your Lordships' House as a revising Chamber. Our present difficulty derives not only from the lack of trust between the coalition parties, as my noble friend Lord Wills suggested, but also from the arrival of the coalition with an effective majority of the coalition parties over the Labour opposition party in this House. What has differentiated the House of Lords from the House of Commons in the past, until the arrival of the coalition, is that, since no one party had a majority over the others in this House, the Government have always had to win the argument. But now the Government fancy that they can bulldoze this House as they can bulldoze the other place. This House will not willingly be crushed. The House of Commons, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, suggested, emasculated itself some years ago in agreeing to timetable all legislation. But when this House, too, can be browbeaten by the Executive, nothing stands in the way of the narcissism and shallowness of Ministers. They feel no need to respond to reasoned argument and to the knowledge and the experience of Members of your Lordships' House. They will not negotiate; they will not agree that their legislation should be amended. I hope that the Leader of the House will heed the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, about negotiation.
	Referendums are a threat to parliamentary government. Why are we having a referendum on the alternative vote? I personally believe that it is right that major constitutional issues should be put to the people in a referendum because it is their constitution, but we are having this referendum to prop up the coalition. The Liberal Democrats wanted electoral reform; the Conservatives did not. The coalition's solution is to have a referendum. There will be no accountability of Ministers to Parliament in this situation. The legislative decision will be made directly by the people. So, as the price of coalition, populism replaces parliamentary sovereignty.
	With the falling away of support for the two main parties, we are led to expect that we shall see more coalitions. Therefore, there will be more pressures from minority parties to be bought and appeased. Shall we in the future, for example, see referendums to satisfy UKIP or the Greens as potential coalition parties? Coalition in modern conditions risks being the death knell of parliamentary government in any worthwhile sense.

Lord Clinton-Davis: I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Symons for making a masterful contribution to this significant debate. The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, treated the House to a relevant review of the past, demonstrating how that departed from the present and illustrating how the two parties in the present coalition Government behaved in the recent general election. In so doing he has demonstrated how relevant that proposition was.
	So far, this coalition Government have made a deliberate attempt to truncate debate, a tactic which-

Noble Lords: Oh!

Lord Clinton-Davis: Why do you laugh? It is absolutely true. I submit that their tactic has brought this House into disrepute, and I hope it will fail. The situation is not helped by the belligerent attitude of some Conservative and some Liberal Democrat Peers. We were shown today by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, whom I normally hold in high repute, how intolerant he could be. I do not think that he has served the House well.
	The Opposition in this House have a very clear duty and I hope that they will not be deflected from it. Their duty is to scrutinise carefully all legislative proposals. No such proposals have ever been incapable of improvement, and that requires constructive dialogue. It takes two to do it but there are too many in this coalition Government who seek to prevent any constructive dialogue taking place.
	I had some experience as a Minister and a European Commissioner, but never did I consider that it was my job to ride roughshod over my opposite number or over those who disliked the Commission. Indeed, I sought, not always successfully, to co-operate with them and to improve the consensus, an ambition which we often shared. That is no longer so.
	Ill-tempered lectures from the Deputy Prime Minister serve no useful purpose; indeed, he should be trying to bring people together rather than dividing them. That is what he should have attempted to do instead of sowing dissension. The same is true of tuition fees, of the so-called reform of the National Health Service and of the Bills that affect the stability of this House. There are other examples, but as far as concerns those three things, we should be especially careful. My noble friend Lady Symons cited in her remarkable speech several examples that should be followed. This Conservative-led coalition closes its ears because it chooses to do so. It prefers to throw ideas into the air and hope that they will survive. There is no attempt, even when major constitutional proposals are broached, to reach any agreement with the opposition Front Bench.
	Of course there is time to change course, and to advance a reasonable exchange of ideas rather than continuing on the disastrous course of imposing Bills that reflect only one point of view, especially when there has been no pre-legislative scrutiny. We should remember that millions of our people, young and old alike, will be affected. My noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport referred to the plight of young people. An increasing number of them will not put up with what they are subjected to at present. They must be heard. I fear that their anger will spill over, leading to further protests and agitation, and threatening the security, stability and cohesion of our nation. Of course change has to take place-it is not too late-but this approach demands an exchange of views and a willingness to hear as well as to speak.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for her truly outstanding speech at the beginning of this debate, and for initiating and launching a debate on this crucial subject at this stage. It is helping the House to think ahead and, I hope, to come to rational conclusions. She and I have been colleagues in the European-Atlantic Group for some time, and it has been a pleasure to see how other countries have conducted their own constitutional relationships, and to take the good examples from some while avoiding the bad examples from others.
	This is a difficult time, as the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davies, said. It is a time when this House should come together. However, I appreciate that that sounds pompous from someone who has been here only since 2004. One needs to be here a long time to understand the amazing subtleties of the House of Lords, which are much more considerable and tangible-occasionally you can get hold of them-than those of the House of Commons, where I was 27 years. I was sad to be defeated at the 1997 election and subsequently changed parties, as small numbers of people in our system have done, with justification. I did not feel that I had changed my basic ideas about the political priorities of our programme formations, in the old days and perhaps in the future, because I had a set of beliefs.
	The cruelties and barbarities of the House of Commons affected all of us Members over a long period. Although the times were interesting and amusing, and provided a great political game and an excitement that is unforgettable, it was a tremendous relief and honour to come to this place and find the rational parliamentary Chamber par excellence-the kind of thing that, surprisingly, one still finds in the lower House equivalents in other countries, where they have regular coalition politics and regard it as a good rather than a bad thing. That is why I was very excited when the new coalition started. I thought that it was a great opportunity for this country to have, as Nick Clegg said, new politics. I am afraid that, having said that, he slipped rather rapidly back into the old politics when he and others immediately criticised the Labour Government for having left an economic and financial mess.
	Leaving some of the detail at the margin outside that argument, my impression was that the Gordon Brown Government had been praised by the famous international institutions governing these matters for having dealt with the financial and economic crisis-the world crisis, not the British crisis-very successfully. I do not think that one loses any political power by saying that if you are a member and representative of another party. That is what I think the public prefer in this country. They still do not like the old yah-boo politics and the artificial adversarial struggle. Therefore, I believe that the public, too, in this country were very excited about the formation of the new coalition.
	One can understand that inevitably mistakes will arise, and I make no criticism at all of colleagues in my own party and those in the Conservative Party who were involved in these very difficult processes, which were all done at great speed, as they apparently had to be under our system. However, I am not sure that I agree with that. I rather like the idea of careful coalition formations-giving information not only before an election but also afterwards if complicated and difficult negotiations are needed on certain problematical high-profile and leading areas of policy formation. Therefore, it was a great opportunity for this country to get away from the old yah-boo politics-the stuff that made visitors to the House of Commons go tense when they heard the shouting. By the way, they still do that at Prime Minister's Question Time. It is a great spectacle but it is also very depressing for all observers, including politicians.
	When mistakes were made, they were natural mistakes made by new colleagues forming the coalition Government. They did so with great excitement, and I can understand that too. I can understand Cameron being literally quite desperate to be in power after spending so many years rescuing a party which a few years ago was regarded as totally written off. The change came remarkably quickly under his skilful leadership. Equally, I can understand Nick Clegg being absolutely desperate-I use that word in praise, not in criticism-to become Deputy Prime Minister and to bring his party into government for the first time after so many years that, due to senescence and the passing of the years, many Liberals and Liberal Democrats cannot remember the last time. It was therefore a great opportunity and there was a lot to be done.
	The difficulty arose in putting the coalition agreement into such a complicated and extensive framework, with far too much detail and too many offerings of what was going to be presented by way of legislation, first in the Commons and then here, with one or two Bills starting here and then going to the Commons. This being a rational, sensible and pragmatic Chamber, where tolerance of other people's views is much higher than in the House of Commons, means that we have to pay attention to the details of these matters. The ironical mistake that has come out of this accidentally-it was no one's fault; it has just happened because it was all new territory and no one knew how it was going to work out-is that the provocative nature of some of the contents of some Bills has now inevitably meant that, once again, the new politics have been replaced by the old. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, mentioned the Health and Social Care Bill, which is now being promulgated, and it is certainly a Bill that we will have to look at very carefully.
	Voltaire, when talking about political action and political legislation in any country, always made a distinction between superstition, as he called it, and philosophy-or perhaps we would say superstition and wisdom. When Bills are based on superstition and ideology, you may be heading for trouble if you have a guaranteed majority and can ride roughshod over everyone else because of the numbers game involved in a coalition. Incidentally, on our side we need to remember that there is no weakness in that. Labour had 29 per cent of the vote, whereas we had 23 per cent. There is no harm in remembering that and bearing in mind that the party which was recently in government and is now in opposition also has some ideas about what this country needs to do to get out of its difficulties. Youth unemployment is probably one of the most serious ones, and on that, I am sure, we need consensus.
	Therefore, superstition in Bills needs to be replaced by wisdom in other Bills, but that will come from realising the mistakes that have been made unwittingly by the people who form the coalition Government. Therefore, I believe that it is right to carry on supporting this coalition and I do so very strongly. I think that I have voted with it on all occasions with the possible exception of one vote on student fees. Incidentally, that, too, is a matter that needs very sober reflection. If a Government-even a single-party Government, let alone a coalition one-have civic disorder and rioting several months after their formation, they have to pause for thought about the background to that civil disorder and the riots and so on. You cannot just brush it aside and say, "There are troublemakers in society. We will go on with what we are planning". You have to think again. That happened with Mrs Thatcher on the poll tax as well, when my friends in Paris phoned me up in amazement and said, "You must be making this up. The British papers are talking about the poll tax-the capitation-which is one of the 10 things that caused the French Revolution". Look what happened in those days too.
	We need to return now to the new politics that we promised-David Cameron used a similar phrase; the involvement of civic society in these processes is also of crucial importance-and produce absolutely first-class legislation from now on. The main opportunity, unfortunately, will take some time to come, because it will be from the next Queen's Speech onwards, which I assume will be in October or November 2012. That is the chance for the coalition Government-who, as we discussed, will continue the distance, because they have a guaranteed majority effective in both Houses. The Government must then produce a list of measures to restore the confidence of the public. There is a lot of work to be done in the mean time, including, I hope, winning the AV referendum.
	The old politics must go. There are too many Bills whenever a new Government come into power, but there is not enough thought about them, with the Whips saying that passage is automatic. There is the testosterone that comes out of the mostly male leaders saying, "We will make no concessions or changes at all to this wonderful Bill. It is written down so you cannot change it at all". There needs to be much more pre-legislative scrutiny with careful examination. The committees of this House are excellent in that field and need to be used more and more. Life is too complicated, so bring out the simplicity in Bills. Do not make them long just because it makes them look more impressive. I have great concerns that if that attitude does not change and if we do not make sure that we genuinely embrace the new politics, there will be continuous trouble-indeed, even disorder-in our society.

Lord Desai: My Lords, at the outset I thank my noble friend Lady Symons of Vernham Dean for introducing this very timely debate. Our difficulties are partly systemic and partly contingent. We are in danger of raising the contingent difficulties to be systemic, while the systemic ones we may just ignore. Let me explain. We have a coalition-yes, there were coalitions in the past, but this one seems to be rather a novel experience-and because our constitution, at least at Westminster level, is majoritarian, there is an assumption by an incoming Government who command a majority, whether that Government are of one party or two, that they get their legislation through, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said. That is an assumption on which the system is based.
	In the devolved constitutions, we have overcome the majoritarian bias and deliberately encouraged what are called consociational arrangements, whereby parties co-operate and work out a compromise. However, in Westminster we have that majoritarian bias in the constitution. It is not true, as many of my noble friends have said, that this is the first experience of a built-in majority in your Lordships' House. I arrived here in 1991. At that time, there was a built-in Conservative majority no matter who was in power, which is how we got the Salisbury/Addison convention. After 1999, when an arrangement was made whereby no single party would have a majority, the Salisbury convention should have been given its day off. Since then, it has not been relevant.
	A related difficulty with the Salisbury convention also arises from the majoritarian nature of the constitution: that, as my noble friend Lord Plant said, manifestos have acquired the sacred status of an implicit contract. If we have a coalition Government who do not have a manifesto, we begin to question whether the Salisbury convention can be applied even after 1999. One of the contingent difficulties of this coalition is that the coalition agreement is much more rigid than a party's manifesto. I did not go to many Labour Party conferences, but every Labour Party conference was a discussion about how the Government in power had betrayed the manifesto. Now the coalition has decided that this is the coalition agreement and that it will not be deviated from by an inch. The present difficulty that we face in your Lordships' House about this Parliament et cetera Bill is that the Government have no room for compromise. In their coalition agreement, they left no room for manoeuvre. Having left no room for manoeuvre, no matter how long the minority may talk its head off, the Government will not concede. That is our dilemma.
	I agree the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said that there is a minority rampant in power. If only. The minority has no weapon in our system other than time and delay. In the Indian Parliament, there is also a coalition, and the Opposition have been so frustrated by not getting their way that they have stopped the Parliament working at all. Every day, it is disrupted. In the entire winter Session of Parliament, not a day's business was done. It was the only way in which the Opposition could prove their power. If the Parliament met, the government majority would defeat any proposition by the Opposition. We are not in that bad a situation, but one has to recognise that here is a coalition agreement, not a manifesto that a party has some control over, that is like a prenuptial agreement, and people are afraid of deviating from it.
	In all the time I have been in your Lordships' House, and before that, we have relied on an implicit code of conduct and rules that are written down but very seldom invoked. In this House, we have had, at least since 1997, and even more since 2010, a big influx of people who have not really absorbed the behaviour and rules of your Lordships' House because you do not learn what they are until you have been here observing them for five or six years. No one actually tells you, and reading the Companion is like reading anything else; it does not tell you how to do things. We currently have the contingent difficulty of a Government who, on principle, have to be inflexible, an Opposition who are very frustrated that they are not being allowed to follow the ordinary procedures of negotiation, and a third of or half the membership of this place who have not, in terms of age in the House of Lords, even reached their teens. We therefore have this problem.
	One of the things we will have to do is re-examine our Companion. I had the privilege of twice being on your Lordships' House's committee on the speakership, and throughout those negotiations, when we installed an elected Speaker the greatest care was taken not to give any power to the Lord Speaker and not to deviate at all from the convention that your Lordships' House is a self-governing entity. That is what we are about to lose, because if this sort of stalemate continues-and this Bill is just a beginning as there are three more constitutional Bills to come, and a health Bill-we will face the problem of the Government having a radical, revolutionary Maoist tendency and being in a great hurry, and I do not blame them. They consist of a party that has been out of power for 13 years and another that has been out of power for 50 or 60 years, so they are in a great hurry. They may not last, so they want to get a lot done.
	If those Bills come through, the strain on the Companion will be great. We should have a commission on the constitution, to which my noble friend Lord Wills referred, or a meeting of the men and women in grey suits, or whatever they are called, to discuss how in the next two or three years we will manage your Lordships' House and get good work done.
	I know why we are behaving how we are. I also know that noble Lords opposite do not like the way in which we are behaving because they think that it is unreasonable, but we are in new times. A number of new things are happening. We need to understand our mutual problems. Away from the Floor of the House, there should be talk about how we can do better business on the Floor of your Lordships' House. If we do not do that, we will be in a stalemate day after day. Even the newspapers will get tired of taking photographs of your Lordships half asleep at 3 am.
	This may be a coalition Government, but who knows whether there will be more? Imagine how much worse the situation would have been if there had been a grand coalition, German style, of Labour and Conservative Members. What would the situation of the Liberal Democrats have been? What would they have done? They would have had to go on hunger strike on the Floor of the House to get their voice heard. We have to be prepared for those things. To use a cliché, we must think outside the box. We still have a lot of good will in your Lordships' House on which we should capitalise to make things better than they are.

Lord Butler of Brockwell: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for giving us the opportunity to discuss this fascinating subject. There was a time when she and I were sparring partners in other capacities. I was Cabinet Secretary and she was general secretary of the First Division Association, and I had responsibility for recording the conventions and rules, political and constitutional. My responsibility was for recording them, not for framing them.
	It is not the job of the Cabinet Secretary to make rules, except perhaps for the Civil Service. Rules are made either by Parliament through statute-for example, the statutes governing the length of a Parliament or the number of paid Ministers-or by the Government themselves, as in the Ministerial Code. Rules that the Government make for themselves, the Government or a successor can change.
	As others have noted, the present Cabinet Secretary has brought together the rules and conventions by which the Executive operates in the draft Cabinet manual. This seems to be a really useful exercise, which, in my view, has been well done. I have some suggestions to make about its content to which I will return. But we should be clear; it is not the creation of the coalition which has made it necessary to produce the manual. The two events are coincidental, although usefully so. The Cabinet manual was in preparation anyway, based on a similar document produced in New Zealand.
	I want to say something on three aspects of the political and constitutional implications of the coalition; that is, the implications for the operations of government, the implications for the Civil Service and the implications for the Salisbury/Addison convention in the House of Lords. As regards the operations of government, there is a lot of evidence, not least from the Prime Minister's speech on public services earlier this week, that announcements of government policies are now preceded by serious discussions and debate in the Cabinet. As a believer, like my noble friend Lord Hennessey, in the idea that well informed debate produces better policy decisions, I welcome that. A coalition was not essential for restoring Cabinet government but if, as it seems, it has had that result, long may it continue.
	As regards the Civil Service, it has been suggested-the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, was saying this-that there are difficulties for an apolitical Civil Service in serving a Government composed of two political parties. I do not agree with that. The role of the Civil Service is to serve the government of the day. As the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, said, all Governments are coalitions of people with different shades of opinion-often quite widely differing shades of opinion, even when they are drawn from the same party. The Civil Service is used to reconciling loyalty to their departmental Minister with loyalty to the Government as a whole. An apolitical Civil Service can be seen as the cement which helps to hold the Queen's Government together. That is why I have always taken the view that a single Civil Service should serve the Government as a whole and the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.
	In that context, like other Members of your Lordships' House, I will say a word on the position we have got into on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. The implications for Parliament, and for your Lordships' House in particular, have been said to be that since the coalition Government agreement was not in front of the electorate at the time of the general election, it is not covered by the Salisbury/Addison convention. That is strictly correct. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, however, I doubt whether that has much practical effect. The Salisbury/Addison convention says that a "manifesto Bill" should be accorded a Second Reading in your Lordships' House, should not be subject to "wrecking amendments" and should be passed and sent, or returned, to the Commons so that they have an opportunity to consider the Bill and any Lords amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said, that is not so different from what your Lordships' House would do to any Bill presented by the Executive. It is always right for this House to give weight to the perceived wishes of the elected House.
	It seems to me that your Lordships should carry out a similar exercise of judgment in relation to the contents of the coalition agreement. In that context, like many other Members of your Lordships' House, I greatly regret the war of attrition that has been going on in the House of Lords this week. I strongly support the role of the Lords as a revising Chamber, in causing the Government to think again, particularly about constitutional Bills and particularly about provisions that may have been forced through the House of Commons without proper debate. However, that should not extend to preventing the Government from passing their legislation.
	The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred-I think I quote him correctly-to a "torrent" of constitutional legislation. There was a pretty good torrent of constitutional legislation in the first year of the new Labour Government in 1997. Indeed, it would be a useful antidote to some of the things that have been said today if your Lordships were to read some of the records of the first year of that Government.
	I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, that this is a time for reasonable behaviour rather than pointing fingers. I confine myself to saying that, like the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, I do not believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, is correct in attributing the present situation to the fact of the coalition. Although the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, about the nature of the politics of the coalition have obvious weight, a similar situation could have arisen if the Conservatives had introduced the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Bill as a single-party Government. I do not think that this is attributable wholly to the fact of the coalition.
	I return to the Cabinet manual. My noble friend Lord Hennessy suggested that two items that might be added to the manual are an up-to-date formulation of the Salisbury/Addison convention and an up-to-date statement of the convention of what constitutes a money Bill. It is not often that I disagree with my noble friend but I rather question these; they are two matters on which Parliament should take the initiative, rather than the Executive. The manual could properly record what Parliament has decided, but it is not for the Executive to take the decision.
	What I would like to see added to the manual, however-this is another matter that some noble Lords have referred to-is some rules that the Executive might impose on themselves to improve the quality of the legislation that they present to Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, made this point powerfully. The Government might commit themselves to a clear statement of the policy intentions of legislation introduced and why legislation is necessary to achieve those intentions, as well as adequate time for public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny wherever possible. That is a theme that has run through many contributions to the debate. Such a statement could include an estimate of the costs of implementing legislation, including a regulatory impact assessment and an indication of targets and performance measures against which the effectiveness of legislation can be measured in post-legislative scrutiny. In my evidence to the Constitution Committee of this House, I shall be making representations that the coalition should adopt such standards and include them in the Cabinet manual.

Lord Howarth of Newport: Before the noble Lord sits down, if the House will allow me, he referred to a torrent of constitutional legislation in the early years of the Labour Government. Will he accept that there were two very important differences between the circumstances then and those now? First, that Labour Government had offered in their manifesto the constitutional policies that they were proposing to the people. Secondly, that Government did not have a majority in your Lordships' House.
	As for later constitutional legislation by that Government-the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act in particular-I myself was very critical on the Floor of the House that the Government were loading more and more items of constitutional reform into that one Bill. Does the noble Lord agree that bad practice then does not justify bad practice now?

Lord Butler of Brockwell: I agree with the first point that the noble Lord made, but I point out to him that the House then accepted the convention that the Executive ought to get their legislation. Even in this new situation, that convention should still apply.
	With regard to that Government not having a majority in this House, the Government do not have an overall majority in this House now. It is important that that should continue to be the situation. I remind the noble Lord that since the general election there have been eight or nine times when the Government have been defeated by votes in your Lordships' House.

Lord Greaves: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, for introducing this interesting and measured discussion of very important issues. We have had the usual mixture in your Lordships' House of expert practitioners, expert academics and journeymen working Peers like myself, which has produced far more consensus around the Chamber than many of us thought would happen before this debate started.
	There has been a slight obsession with the Liberal Democrats, perhaps understandably. There is only one that I really want to pick up on. I hesitate to quibble historically with a distinguished historian such as the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, who went back a long time, though only in this country, to tell us of the past history of coalitions and the disastrous effects that they had on the Liberal Party. The point is that each of the ones he cited followed a significant and catastrophic split within the Liberal Party. That is not the case now and it is not going to be the case. We are in this for five years and so all of us have to make it work in the mean time.
	If this is a new type of coalition, as the noble Baroness suggested, then it is a completely new governmental and parliamentary situation. It started off when the coalition was being negotiated, when nobody in the political parties had thought it through properly beforehand. It had to be made up as they went along. It is still being made up, week by week, month by month. The position is still evolving. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, a great deal of whose speech I agreed with, said that the coalition had had a major effect on the process of formation and the resulting policy. Another effect is on the ongoing processes of government, which, as I said, are still evolving.
	My noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, pointed out in an intervention that the coalition was put together in five days. One of the important lessons must be that in future coalition-building in this country after an election really ought to take place at a slightly more measured pace, and to take the normal 10 or 14 days which everybody else in the world expects as a minimum. The five days led to two defects. First, the coalition agreement was not comprehensive and missed great chunks out. What was in was often too detailed, not always properly thought out and in some cases the political implications of what was agreed as a quick fix had not been thought through at all, notably and most importantly on tuition fees, which have proved so harmful to my party.
	Secondly, there was no time during that period to think seriously about the processes of government, the changes that were forced on the Government and Parliament by the fact of coalition, and those which were not forced but were perhaps thought to be desirable. The result was the attempt we have seen to fit a two-party Government into a one-party mould. A great deal of the problems that have arisen with the coalition since then have resulted from the application of procedures, customs and practices which have been designed for a single-party Government when we now have two parties in government together. It started off with all the new Ministers getting a memo from the Civil Service-I presume it was the one that would have been sent out anyway-which was inappropriate for a two-party Government. One of the first coalition documents sets out what is really little different from what had gone before in terms of the way the Government were going to work and ministerial responsibility. It was basically what had gone before. Since then processes have evolved and are still evolving. As members of a coalition party who are not members of the Government, we are involved in some of those processes but they have not gone far enough. The processes still do not really accept that what we have are two parties from different traditions with different philosophies-a centre-left liberal party and a centre-right conservative party. I use a small "l" and a small "c" for the words "liberal" and "conservative", although they are obviously the party names as well.
	Like my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart, I believe that the internal processes of government must be more open and transparent. Both parties will benefit if their positions are better understood in the country and if the inevitable compromises and trade-offs which are taking place day by day, week by week and month by month are much clearer to people who are interested. There is a need to explain the discussions that are going on and the results of those discussions. It is foolish to pretend that detailed agreement exists between the two parties on every issue. It is foolish to see Liberals going on programmes such as "Newsnight", defending Tory policies in detail that we all know they do not really agree with, and vice versa: it is foolish to see Tories trying to defend things they do not agree with which they have had to accept because they are in coalition with us. As my noble friend said, the foreword to the coalition agreement states that,
	"we will extend transparency to every area of public life".
	It is time that it started at the top.
	People will say that it is very difficult because we live in a media environment which is one of the worst in the democratic world. The media observe policy differences and call it a split; they observe policy discussions and call it a row; they observe compromises and call it a betrayal; they observe trade-offs and call it broken promises; they observe a refusal to agree with consultation responses and call it ideological stubbornness; they observe changes as a result of consultation and call it a U-turn; and if they do not see any of these things they invent them. However, that is the media we have to deal with and the difficulties that we have with the British media should not get in the way of what should be done.
	For the whole of my political lifetime over 50 years, people have said of the Liberal Democrats, "You are never in power. You can say what you like but it is a waste of time voting for you". Now they are saying, "You have thrown away your principles for ministerial seats". They are both points of view, but when they come from the same people very rapidly it is, at the least, a little annoying.
	The real problem is that in all these things the Opposition-I do not blame the Labour Party specifically for this because Oppositions take their opportunities within the adversarial system that we have-cannot resist joining in; they cannot resist chasing the cheap headline to feed off the prejudices and the way in which the press works. I am not suggesting that we would not do the same in opposition, but they cannot resist pandering to pressure groups who thought they would get a particular policy through but now find that things have changed. Those kinds of attacks on the coalition undermine a sensible coalition environment.
	I say to the Labour Party, "You may be in coalition the next time or the time after that. Think about it. If there is a new political environment, perhaps the debate needs to change". There has been enough material put forward by this Government which can be rationally and constructively criticised, for heaven's sake. I shall do so myself as a Back-Bencher. There is plenty of that to do without descending to silly, childish abuse.
	Many noble Lords have referred to the implications for this House. It is absolutely vital that legislation receives detailed and sufficient scrutiny, revision and improvement as a result of constructive and tolerant interchange. That is what this House is all about, and this group is totally committed to continuing that under the coalition environment. As other Lords have pointed out in different words, this House works because there is an atmosphere of agreement and tolerance between the different sides of the House.
	The Government's side of the deal is to listen, discuss, negotiate and accept some changes, even if they are not completely thrilled about them. The amendment about the Isle of Wight that was discussed yesterday is a case in point. That amendment does not undermine the foundations of the Bill; it does not cause the whole thing to come tumbling down; it is a detail. The detail on the Scottish islands has already been accepted and, if the Government are prepared to accept the amendment on the Isle of Wight, it will be an indication that at least they are beginning to become a little flexible.
	The deal on the Opposition is that, in return, they do not abuse the procedures; they do not destroy the ability of the House to scrutinise, revise and improve; and, in particular, they have a duty not to make self-regulation impossible. That is the deal, but it has broken down on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. We can argue about who is right, who is wrong and who is most to blame. I say the Opposition are to blame-but I would accept the Mandy Rice-Davies caveat that I would say that anyway. Nevertheless, it does not matter who is to blame; it has broken down and both sides of the House have got to repair it. If we do not, it will become impossible for this House to carry out its duties on all kinds of new Bills.
	We have a pivotal role-I shall finish with this-in that we possess loyalty and support for the coalition. We are not going to undermine its fundamentals-we are in it for five years-so do not think anything different. However, we are still an autonomous group within the coalition with a distinctive perspective on politics. We are also committed to the proper role of this House. Those three matters cause us great difficulties at times because they conflict in all kinds of ways. We are committed to the coalition and will try to make it succeed. I hope other parts of the House will understand what we are trying to do and help us to do it because it will help the Opposition if we are able to play that role.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, we are now near the end of what has been a serious and very searching debate-a debate which, I am glad to say after this rather torrid week, has been both temperate and timely. Some people, especially in some parts of the media, have seen the events in your Lordships' House this week as supporting their negative view of this place. However, I hope that they will look as hard at today's debate as they have at those of the past few days. Today's debate has, like so many others, shown this House at its best. It has been serious; we have discussed the issues. It has been searching and we have not held back from criticism where we believe that it has been due.
	I welcome the fact that the noble Lord the Leader of the House has judged this debate to be of sufficient weight to answer it himself. I am very grateful to him for doing so, especially after this week. I am confident that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will seek to counter the arguments on the issues involved in the constitutional and parliamentary effect of the coalition, which have been put up today by all sides of the House. However, he has quite a job to do.
	In her extraordinary and comprehensive opening speech at the outset of the debate, my noble friend Lady Symons of Vernham Dean ranged widely from points about the history of coalitions to their nature and characteristics, and the effect of this coalition. It being such a detailed speech, I shrink slightly from picking out a particular issue to put to the Minister, but its main point was absolutely clear: the legitimacy of this coalition Government, in particular in respect of seeking to change both the constitution and Parliament. As my noble friend Lord Morgan said, this coalition was the product of private negotiation. No single elector in this country voted for the coalition or approved its programme for government. We fully recognise the constitutional legitimacy of being asked by Her Majesty to form a Government. However, without the legitimacy conferred by election-without the validation of a mandate provided by the electorate-any coalition Government should tread warily when they address certain issues, of which constitutional and parliamentary reform, especially reform of the key central institutions of our democracy, are paramount.
	Do the Leader of the House and his Government accept that, in the light of the circumstances of the formation of the coalition, the Government should be both extremely cautious and extremely careful in proceeding with constitutional and parliamentary reform; and that where it does, it should do so only after the widest possible consultation? Also, I am sure the noble Lord will agree with so many in this House today who have suggested that for Bills of such constitutional importance, pre-legislative scrutiny is particularly important. Does the Leader of the House accept, as we believe he must, that without a democratic mandate-without the direct and specific approval of the electorate for either the coalition or its programme-there can be no mandate for Bills; and that without a mandate for a Bill there can be no protection provided by the Salisbury/Addison convention?
	Many speakers in this afternoon's debate addressed the issue of the democratic gap at the heart of the coalition. My noble friend Lord Plant of Highfield said that the manifestos were, in effect, quasi-contracts with the electorate. My noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport said that not only had the policies of the coalition not been endorsed by the electorate, they had not even been exhibited to them. I was delighted that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells, in a careful and thoughtful contribution, related today's debate to the concerns of the people out there-the citizens whose views we all seek to voice. He said that it was important that the Executive did not bring forward proposals that were not in line with the will of the people. That is a terribly important point.
	The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan of Rogart, appeared to suggest that my noble friend Lady Symons had questioned the right of a Government to bring forward legislation that was not in the relevant manifestos of the component parts of the coalition. However, I do not believe that she did any such thing. My noble friend went out of her way to say that a Government who have the confidence of another place should have commensurate authority. What my noble friend questioned was the Government bringing forward, without public consultation or pre-legislative scrutiny, constitutional legislation not specified in manifestos, which was then made subject to a closure Motion when this House was exercising its right and duty to scrutinise legislation.
	Many noble Lords addressed the issue of the Salisbury convention. I rather like the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey of Nympsfield, that a new convention should be introduced to replace the Salisbury/Addison convention with one entitled the Strathclyde/Royall/McNally convention, named after our three party leaders in your Lordships' House. While such a place in parliamentary history would probably be thrilling, I suspect that we might do better to stick to the convention we have, albeit one that is under great strain. Perhaps this is a matter that we should discuss further.
	My noble friend Lord Wills took a slightly different approach to consideration of new machinery on conventions by urging the Government to revive or bring forward in a new form the working group on the constitution set up by my party when we were in government. With the establishment of the coalition, there is even greater urgency to look at these issues, because our system is evolving rather quickly. I would certainly welcome the views of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on this issue. I hope that he will take away the idea from my noble friend and perhaps pursue it within government.
	The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, drew both points together. He underlined that the important constitutional position before this House is indeed the Salisbury convention and suggested that the Government should build on the work of the Constitution Committee of your Lordships' House. I would be very much in favour of that, but perhaps the issue is of such wide importance that an independent body should also be looking at it.
	My noble friend Lord Hart of Chilton, who is a member of the Constitution Committee of this House, skilfully drew together a wide range of recommendations of the committee and stressed the need for rigorous scrutiny, including pre-legislative scrutiny, which I, like my noble friend and others, think should be axiomatic.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, who said he did not wish to comment on this week's events, but did so very skilfully, was wise in many of his comments. I agree with him that the decline in standards, as it were, started in the other place with timetabling Motions and so on. However, I would say firmly to him and to the House, that on these Benches we are completely against the use of timetabling Motions. The noble Lord suggested that perhaps in Opposition we might be in favour of them, but that is absolutely not the case. We recognise that if timetabling Motions were to be introduced, and I am not suggesting that they will be, they would profoundly change the nature of this House as a revising Chamber, which is something that we all cherish.
	The noble Lord and others also raised the issue of whether or not the Government are entitled to get their business. Yes, the Government are entitled to get their business. There is the matter of a sort of self-imposed timetable on Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, but the Government must get their business.
	The noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, suggested that the difficulties we have at present would have arisen if the Conservatives had been governing alone. That is not the case. The problem arose from very fact that there is a coalition Government and the Bill, which is in effect two Bills, acts as glue for the coalition. I disagree with the noble Lord that this situation would have arisen if there had been a Conservative-only Government.
	I put one thing on the record about what has been happening during the past two weeks. It arises from the interventions by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and others. The clear will of the House, as expressed yesterday by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill, the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, is that we must find a negotiated solution. All around the House, we believe that that is what we must do.
	The rumour mill around the House is that discussions are taking place but they have not been productive to date. I am sure that they can be successful; I know that the whole House is willing that to be the case; and I very much hope that that will be so. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, urged the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to come to their senses over the referendum. I certainly agree with that.
	The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, went further than anyone else in this House by saying that he believed that we were in a serious constitutional crisis. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested that we could step back from the brink. As I said, I believe that we can step do so. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said that issues of such seriousness had arisen from the Bill that they might have to be addressed in future legislation-legislation that might have to be passed using the Parliament Acts. What is the view of the noble Lord the Leader of the House on that issue and is that Government policy?
	We acknowledge that there are valuable aspects of coalition Governments. In times of crises, war or financial disaster staring our country on the face, there can be real value in coalition Government with real support in the country for political parties joining together in the national interest. There is no doubt that, at the start of their period in office, this coalition Government attracted such support. I believe that there is a decline in that support, as witnessed by the polls, but it is also clear that there is considered and considerable criticism of what the coalition have been doing to the constitution and to Parliament-criticism in this House, as well as in the country. That is the conclusion of our debate today. There are many questions to be answered. There is cumulative criticism, which I believe that the Government and the Leader of the House have to answer, and I look forward to his answer to today's welcome debate.

Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, it is no surprise to me that this debate has been most interesting, given the number of speakers and the quality of noble Lords who have played their part. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, on securing the debate-and for her timing, which was excellent. I do not agree with most of what she said; I do not suppose that that will surprise her. In instances, it was almost a speech of someone who believes that the Labour Party will never again be in government. I shall develop this theme: saying one thing in government and another in opposition-behaving one way in government and another in opposition.
	I very much welcome the contribution of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells. I am one of those who very much appreciates the fact that the right reverend Prelates are prepared to give up a great deal of time to play their part in this House. It is appreciated by the whole House. I also very much welcome the speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Butler of Brockwell and Lord Hennessey, and my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth. It may surprise the noble Baroness, but I also very much enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. He raised some extremely important issues to which I shall try to return.
	I could not help but smile at the great sincerity with which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, demands humility from this Government. He was a supporter for so long of a Government who left behind one of the greatest financial messes that this country has ever seen-who brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy with this massive deficit. The noble Lord, Lord Plant, was interesting because he talked about the relationship between government and the people under the previous Government. The previous Government taxed their people, overspent, overborrowed and beggared the people. Worst of all, they wasted the people's money on their own schemes. That is why the next few years are going to be so difficult in this country. An apology might have been appreciated early on in this new Parliament.
	The noble Lord, Lord Butler, reminded us of the constitutional hunger of Mr Blair's Government. I wrote down, from memory, a few of them: the Bank of England, Scotland and Wales, regional governments, London governments, and, of course, House of Lords reform-all without thought, without plan, and without conclusion still. Mr Blair said the House of Lords was an affront to democracy. If it was that then, what is it now after 13 years of their Government-the abolition of the Lord Chancellor, the creation of a new Supreme Court, locking people up without charge? Again, there is no apology, not even for the disgrace of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. Noble Lords opposite talking about humility really should take great care to ever take part in a constitutional Bill again. And I mock those noble Lords who voted happily for that Bill in the House of Commons and then in the House of Lords pontificate and lecture us about constitutional Bills. I mock them.
	What else? Ah, the conventions in this House. Let me turn to the Hunt report. The Hunt of the Hunt report is not my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral, but the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. He suggested-this is Labour Party policy-that it is wrong that a Bill can potentially be in jeopardy because some Peers within the rules of the House can threaten to spend endless time debating a particular Bill. What on earth have noble Lords opposite been doing over the last few weeks? I will return to that.
	We are seeing a genuine parliamentary tragedy unfolding before our eyes in this House; a wholesale breaking of the conventions, including those on secondary legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, mentioned that and sought a justification for breaking a convention that has withstood the test of time, and several Oppositions, for the last 35 years-broken last month only to be broken again on Monday. These are important conventions that have governed the relationship between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party; no warning, no criteria, just broken.
	It has been a calm debate and it is important that it should be. I very much welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey, said about new conventions. It does not really matter what they are called. It may be too late for that. We may have gone beyond the time for conventions, because conventions require self-discipline. They require people who give their agreement to behave in a particular way. Once that behaviour has been broken, it is very difficult to put the conventions back together again.
	The other theme is the question of the mandate, mentioned by the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons and one or two others. It is always good to have this coupled with the call that we should consult the people more and find out what is going on. The coalition, it is said, has no mandate and no legitimacy for its constitutional reforms. No one voted for it. We are proposing to give the public a say on 5 May on the voting system for elections to the House of Commons. It is noble Lords on the Benches opposite who are standing in the way of that. What mandate do noble Lords on the Benches opposite have for the stance that they have chosen? Do they really believe that the public will thank them for denying them the opportunity to have their say? While we are on the case of mandates-this wonderful new constitutional convention-what mandate did Mr Gordon Brown have as Prime Minister? Who voted for any of the things he did according to noble Lords opposite? My view of a mandate is that people elect Members of the House of Commons and whoever commands the confidence of the House of Commons governs. That is the mandate that I understand.
	Coalition Governments, national Governments, and minority Governments are more common than usually thought. In the 20th century, five elections produced a hung Parliament, albeit only one of them post-war, that of February 1974. Both James Callaghan and John Major saw their parliamentary majorities eroded over the course of a Parliament. In the case of the former, that led to the Lib-Lab pact and, of course, there were coalition Governments: the national Government of 1931 to 1940 and the two wartime Governments.
	Since the Second World War, we have witnessed the rise of a strong third party in the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors and the emergence of strong nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. In addition, in Northern Ireland, there are a number of parties that are represented at Westminster. Indeed, the experience in the devolved Administrations has given further experience of the workings of coalitions, particularly in Scotland, where we initially had the experience of a formal coalition commanding a majority in the Scottish Parliament and have more recently had single-party minority rule. So this coalition Government is not unprecedented, and the challenges that have been posed to our constitution and to Parliament have, I believe, been met successfully.
	There are two areas I wish to address where the effects of a coalition Government would have been expected to have been felt: on the operation of the Executive and on the operation of Parliament. I believe that the strength and resilience of our constitution and the parliamentary system have been evident. The constitution has not had to change to accommodate coalition government. Our institutions were well prepared to address the situation and to respond appropriately, effectively and pragmatically. In the first area, looking at the Executive, there has had to be some adjustment and accommodation. However, in the second area, that of Parliament, there has been minimal need for change.
	There are many benefits of having a flexible, uncodified constitution that can evolve over time. However, it is also important that there is a shared understanding of the constitutional rules and conventions that apply. That is why, in February 2010, the Cabinet Office published a draft chapter of the Cabinet manual on elections and government formation. The chapter set out the key principles that would apply following a hung Parliament, including the role of the Sovereign, the Prime Minister, the political parties and the Civil Service. In particular, it stated that it was for the political parties to determine the shape of the Government and that the Sovereign would not expect to be involved in such discussions; that the incumbent Prime Minister was expected to remain in post until there was a clear alternative; and that the Civil Service, with the authorisation of the Prime Minister, could offer support for any negotiations between the political parties. That offer of support was taken up by a number of parties in the negotiations that followed the election in May 2010.
	My noble friend Lord Greaves suggested that in future we should take longer to form a Government. Given public expectations, media interest and economic pressures, those involved in the process this year were very aware that a swift resolution was needed and that there was a real risk that the markets would react if negotiations went on for a longer period. I recognise that the length of time it took to form a Government in May was much quicker than elsewhere in Europe and, indeed, it is possible that in future the negotiation period might be longer, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, it was right to stabilise the markets. He said that that was a success. I know he does not agree with everything else the coalition has done and that he regrets the fact that proper proportional representation is not an option in the referendum, but there is a reason for that, which is that there is no majority for PR in the House of Commons or, I suspect, in this House.
	Setting out the key principles in advance of the election in the draft Cabinet manual helped to reduce uncertainty for those involved in the process of government formation. It also made the rules and conventions more transparent and helped to inform the media and members of the public. The chapter "Elections and government formation" has since been amended. The principles set out in the February draft still hold true, but the text has been developed following consideration of the recommendations made by the House of Commons Justice Committee and to reflect the experience of the most recent election. We have also given parliamentarians and other experts a further opportunity to lend their experience and knowledge in developing the final Cabinet manual. A draft of the full Cabinet manual was published on 14 December, which allows three months for comment.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth and others asked for a debate on the manual, but there is no reason why we should debate it. As I said, the draft manual is published for public consultation and the Government would very much welcome views on the draft manual from either House and anybody with an interest, as the consultation ends on 8 March 2011. The noble Baroness also asked about its status. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, thinks that it is probably the first draft of a written constitution, although I may have misunderstood him. He is shaking his head vigorously. I am very glad that I misheard him, because the Government have no plans to codify the constitutional conventions in operation in the UK or to bring forward proposals for the adoption of a codified constitution in the UK. Anyone who reads the document will see that it is an overview of the rules and conventions that relate to the work of the Cabinet.
	The principle of collective agreement binds the members of the Government in the usual way. However, there are some areas in the coalition agreement where that is explicitly set aside, not least in relation to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill that is currently before the House, where the principle will not apply in relation to the positions that the two political parties may take during the referendum campaign. We are one Government, but we respect that the coalition contains two political parties that will take different positions on certain issues. These arrangements and the different parts of the Cabinet system are working together effectively to promote collective government, to manage government business and priorities and to protect the principles set out in the coalition agreement.
	A concern was expressed by a number of noble Lords about whether and how the coalition Government may affect the more fundamental constitutional conventions governing this place, especially the Salisbury/Addison convention. Let me be clear that I do not believe that any of the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses has been called into question by the coalition itself. Many people-not least the most recent Joint Committee on Conventions-have considered the possibility that one day there might be a coalition Government. They have not concluded that this would presage a constitutional crisis. Instead, they have tended to consider maturely and reach the conclusion that our current constitutional conventions are well thought-out and easily robust enough to withstand the entirely predictable possibility that government might consist of not one party but two or, perhaps in the future, even more parties.
	The present Government are the first coalition Government since the Salisbury convention was formulated in its classic form. Inevitably, there are some stresses within the system. The Salisbury convention applies to manifesto Bills, but this Government did not contest the election as a single party under a single manifesto. However, the Government, like all others, were formed and are sustained on the basis of the confidence of the House of Commons. This confidence has been secured on the basis of a programme set out in the coalition agreement. Like any Government, we have brought forward some measures that were in the manifesto and some that were not.
	So the Salisbury convention continues to apply, although perhaps it is not as often relevant as when a single party wins a majority. It is difficult now to determine what precisely constitutes a manifesto Bill but, then again, it was ever thus. I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, who said that he did not think that the Salisbury convention had much meaning any more. I disagree with him and incline more towards the view of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey, and my noble friend Lord Norton.
	The Salisbury convention was only ever one manifestation of the relationship between the two Houses, which is based, as we all know, on the primacy of the other place. We in this House do not routinely oppose government legislation, whether or not it derives from a manifesto. That much was made clear by the Joint Committee in 2006, so it is not special pleading by a coalition Government. So many noble Lords on all sides of the House cling dearly to the idea that we are a revising House-a House of scrutiny, not of opposition-although you would be hard-pressed to believe that when looking at the antics in the House in the past few days. All of us on this side of the House are fond of reminding those opposite what the last Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, said in 2006. He said that,
	"if any coalition or arrangement as in 1977 gains the support of the democratically elected House and endorsed by a motion of confidence then the programme for which they gain that endorsement should be respected by this House"-
	the House of Lords. That was the previous Government's understanding of the constitutional convention regarding coalitions.
	The noble Lord, Lord Wills, asked about the working group on the constitution. I must say that I had no idea about this great body, but I have made inquiries and I understand that the previous Government announced that they would set up such a body to look at law and the relationships between the state and citizen as well as what principles should be deemed constitutional. I also understand that the group was never in fact convened and did not publish any reports or any other documents, so I suspect that it still languishes in the bottom drawer of somebody's desk. We have no plans at this stage to resurrect it.
	Another curious theme, which I think explains an awful lot about the attitude of the Labour Party that has developed over the past few months, was the idea that the coalition has a majority in this House. That is a fundamental misunderstanding between the two sides of the House. The noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, got it right. I shall not explain it now, but if any noble Lord would like a lesson in mathematics we can look at the numbers and go through them to see whether the coalition has any more of a majority than the Labour Party had. It is a great mistake to ignore the Cross Benches, and I do not know why noble Lords opposite do that. The example of the coalition losing a Division yesterday is a case in point. As well as the Cross Benches, there are Members of the DUP, the UUP and even UKIP. It would be very unwise to discount that when considering the arithmetic of this House.
	You have only to look at the progress of the Public Bodies Bill-let us leave aside the controversy of the AV Bill. My noble friend said that that was the right way to do things, and he is correct. An agreement was struck on the timing, and there was no problem there; that is the way in which we behave, and quite rightly.
	The noble Baroness said that there should be a referendum on the future of Lords reform. That is the first time that we have heard of that. In Labour's last manifesto, it took an awful long time to get there.
	My noble friend Lord Norton said that there should be a debate in the House on how consideration of Bills of constitutional significance should take place. I think that we should have debates from time to time on these issues, and we should also have debates with the House of Commons about how constitutional Bills are taken through. I hope that my noble friend will write to his and my noble friend Lord Goodlad, who is looking at the working practices of this House. Again, that is a very timely review of how we are doing things, when the House has broken with so many of its conventions.

Lord Campbell-Savours: Having heard the very interesting contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Owen, on the issue of questions in the referendum, I recognise that the Liberal Democrats-one element in the coalition-have historically been very strongly committed to proportional representation, but why was it that, when decisions on the referendum question were being taken, proportional representation was not included in the question? That might have invited the House of Commons to knock out the provision if it did not want to proceed down that route, and that could have been done on a free vote. It may well be that the decision taken by the House of Commons would have been different from the one that Ministers took.

Lord Strathclyde: That could have been the case, and no doubt an amendment could have been proposed in another place, but the agreement struck by the coalition was for AV, which is a method that was in the Labour Party's manifesto. It is entirely right that we should scrutinise and stick to that.
	However, in the Bill that we are dealing with, things have happened that neither I-in the 25 years that I have been here-nor any of my predecessors as Leaders and Chief Whips has ever seen before: I refer to the wholesale breakdown and refusal of the usual channels to engage. The noble Lord said that we should negotiate, but we negotiate on every Bill. This is the first time ever that the usual channels have said, "We refuse. We refuse to tell you how many days we want in Committee".
	When they asked for more days, we gave them more. I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, who said that we are rushing the Bill through the House. He and his friends in the Labour Party are the only people in the universe who believe that the Bill is being rushed through this House. In 22 hours on Monday, only six amendments were considered. This is unprecedented. The idea that this is scrutiny is farcical. Noble Lords opposite who cherish the reputation of this House have no idea how damaging this is to the reputation of this House. It is not scrutiny but verbosity. It may be too late.

Lord Howarth of Newport: I am very grateful to the noble Lord-he must be nearing the end of his remarks. The House always looks to the Leader of the House to unify us, to reach across the political divide and to bring us together as one House of Lords. This, as he noted, has been a very difficult week for the House. So far, the noble Lord has told the House that he mocks noble Lords on this side. Does he also have anything to say, as my noble friend the shadow Leader of the House did, in a spirit of reconciliation, to help us bind up the wounds of this week?

Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, before the noble Lord twists my words, I mocked those who did one thing in another place and then come here and complain about the very behaviour in another place-it was quite specific. On reconciliation, yesterday the coalition Government were defeated on an amendment. On subsequent amendments, my noble friends and I offered meetings and reconciliation-the normal way of doing things. How were we rewarded? There was no agreement on finishing the Committee. I would love there to be a reconciliation. The noble Baroness and I, who are personally on very good terms, are very keen to find a way through this, but very soon, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, said last night, the Bill will not be passed and there will not be a referendum on 5 May. That will be because the House of Lords has dragged its heels and we should think very carefully before we take that final step.
	I shall finish, because I have gone over time, by thanking all noble Lords who have taken part and the many noble Lords who have come in to listen during the day. It is a debate, no doubt, that we shall come back to again and again and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I had some concerns that the events of the past few days might dominate the debate today, so I am grateful that almost all the speakers managed to lift their eyes, for the majority of the contributions, from the narrow focus of the past few days and address the very important long-term issues inherent in any coalition in this country, and those that have arisen specifically in relation to this Government.
	The debate was conducted with courtesy almost all the time and, mostly, with good will. There were important and thoughtful speeches from our constitutional experts on all sides of the House-I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for his contribution-and contributions from our own Constitution Committee.
	I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for his wise words. I hope that he might take the noble Lord the Leader of the House aside for a bit of a pep talk. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Owen, for cheering me up a great deal with his observations about the timing of the AV referendum.
	I thank the noble Lord the Leader of the House for answering the debate, which was a courtesy. I am sorry about his repeated remarks mocking Members of the House that he leads; I thought that they were inappropriate for a debate such as this. However, I thank him for the opportunity to say how much I look forward to a Labour Government-he need have no worries on that score.
	The noble Lord said that he was attracted by the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, but I do not believe that the majority of the House is attracted by them; nor, I believe, if I may be a little presumptuous, are the majority of his Benches. I look forward to a debate on the Cabinet Office manual-I will pop along to see the noble Lord and we will do our arithmetic together.
	I thank my noble friend Lady Royall for summing up on our side of House in such a measured, sensible and comprehensive way that looked towards the healing process of the future. I thank everyone who has participated, and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
	Motion withdrawn.

Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2011

Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2001

Motion to Approve

Moved By Baroness Neville-Jones
	That the draft Order laid before the House on 17 January be approved.

Baroness Neville-Jones: My Lords, the terrorist threat to the UK and its interests abroad remains severe and sustained. The Government are determined to do all that they can to minimise that threat. Proscription of terrorist organisations is an important part of the Government's strategy to tackle terrorist activities. We would therefore like to add the organisation Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the TTP, to the list of 46 international terrorist organisations that are listed under Schedule 2 to the Terrorism Act 2000. Having carefully considered all the evidence, the Home Secretary firmly believes that the TTP meets the statutory and discretionary tests for proscription. This is the ninth proscription order amending Schedule 2 to that Act.
	Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides a power for the Home Secretary to proscribe an organisation if she believes that it is concerned in terrorism. The Act specifies that an organisation is concerned in terrorism if it commits or participates in acts of terrorism; prepares for terrorism; promotes or encourages terrorism, including the unlawful glorification of terrorism; or is otherwise concerned in terrorism.
	The Home Secretary may proscribe an organisation only if she believes that it is concerned in terrorism. If the test is met, she may then exercise her discretion to proscribe the organisation. In considering whether to exercise that discretion, she takes into account a number of factors, which were announced to Parliament during the passage of the Terrorism Act in 2000. The factors considered are the nature and scale of an organisation's activities; the specific threat that it poses to the United Kingdom; the specific threat that it poses to British nationals overseas; the organisation's presence in the United Kingdom; and the need to support other members of the international community in tackling terrorism.
	Proscription is a tough but necessary power. Its effect is that the proscribed organisation is outlawed and is unable to operate in the UK. Proscription means that it is a criminal offence for a person to belong to, or invite support for, a proscribed organisation. It is also a criminal offence to arrange a meeting in support of a proscribed organisation or to wear clothing or to carry articles in public which arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.
	Given the wide-ranging impact of proscription, the Home Secretary exercises her power to proscribe an organisation only after thoroughly reviewing all the available relevant information on the organisation. This includes open-source material as well as intelligence material, legal advice and advice reflecting consultation across government, including with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Decisions on proscription are taken with great care by the Home Secretary, and it is also right that both Houses must approve the order proscribing a new organisation.
	Having carefully considered all the advice, the Home Secretary firmly believes that the TTP is currently concerned in terrorism. Although, as noble Lords will appreciate, I am unable to go into much detail on the evidence, I am able to summarise. The TTP's stated objectives are: the enforcement of Sharia, resistance to the Pakistani army and the removal of NATO forces from Afghanistan. The group is a prolific terrorist organisation which has frequently perpetrated attacks in Pakistan. For example, an attack in July last year on a meeting of tribal elders in a marketplace in the Mohmand Agency killed 104 people and injured 120. Two recent suicide attacks on army vehicles in Lahore killed 57 people in March last year. Although the majority of attacks have been against military and governmental targets, the TTP is known also to target crowded areas and places of worship; for example, an attack on the two Ahmadi mosques in May 2010 which killed more than 80 civilians.
	The group is also known to target and claim responsibility for attacks on western targets; for example, in June 2010, an attack on a NATO convoy just outside Islamabad killed seven people and destroyed 50 vehicles and, in April 2010, an attack on the US consulate in Peshawar killed at least six. The TTP has also threatened attacks in the West and was implicated in the failed Times Square car bomb in New York last May.
	The proscription of the TTP will contribute to making the UK a hostile environment for terrorists and their supporters, and will signal our condemnation of the terrorist attacks that the group continues to carry out in Pakistan. Proscription will also support the emerging international consensus against the organisation. The TTP is already designated by the United States and Pakistan, and I understand that proscription is being considered by a number of other countries.
	Proscribing the TTP will enable the police to carry out disruptive action against any supporters in the UK. It will also send a strong message that the UK is not willing to tolerate terrorism either here or anywhere else. Proscription is not targeted at any particular faith or social grouping, but it is based on evidence that the organisation is concerned in terrorism. It is clear that the TTP is not representative of Pakistani or Muslim communities in the UK. The organisation has carried out a large number of attacks in Pakistan resulting in mass casualties. I know that the vast majority of British Muslims joined us all in condemning those abhorrent acts of violence.
	Finally, I have already said that the Government recognise that proscription is a tough power that can have a wide-ranging impact. Because of that, there is an appeal mechanism in the legislation, and any organisation that is proscribed or any that is affected by the proscription of an organisation can apply to the Home Secretary for the organisation to be de-proscribed. If the application is refused, the applicant also has a right to appeal through the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission, which is a special tribunal that is able to consider the sensitive material that often underpins proscription decisions. A special advocate can also be appointed to represent the interests of the applicant in closed sessions of the commission. This is a fair process.
	There is ample evidence to suggest that the TTP is concerned in terrorism, and I believe it is right that we add it to the list of proscribed organisations under Schedule 2 to the Terrorism Act 2000. I commend the order to the House.

Lord Scott of Foscote: My Lords, I have no doubt whatever that the House should support this order, and I rise simply to ask why it has taken so long for the order to be sought. It appears from the contents of the letter that the Minister sent to the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, the chairman of the Merits Committee, in anticipation of the meeting that the committee had to peruse this document, that information has been in the hands of the authorities indicating that since 2007 the TTP has carried out mass-casualty attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that it was implicated in an attempted Times Square car bomb attack in May 2010, and that there were other atrocities in the first half of 2010, as referred to by the noble Baroness. Although I thoroughly support the making of the order, I wonder why it has taken so long for it to be made.

Lord Reid of Cardowan: My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister as I was slightly late in coming into the Chamber for her opening speech. However, I welcome the order and I also welcome the fact that time has been taken over it. Noble Lords may be aware that when the now Prime Minister was asking us to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, I said that it is absolutely essential that, when we take action to proscribe or ban, we have sufficient evidence to make sure that, however great our revulsion at what these people are doing, that action is taken under the letter of the UK law and that we have sufficient evidence of that law being breached; otherwise, when these people appealed, it would be a propaganda coup for them if we were to take action that failed. Therefore, I thank the Minister for her Statement today. I understand how difficult it often is to get concrete evidence to carry such measures forward, but I am sure that, even at this stage, we will all be relieved that the action has been taken, because these are very dangerous people.

Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I also support the order, but I have one or two questions about the process. It is a very difficult process and I would be grateful for guidance from the noble Baroness as to how it operates. The reference to Hizb ut-Tahrir that we have just heard from my noble friend Lord Reid is important. I know that, when he was leader of the Opposition, there was a desire by the now Prime Minister for that organisation to be proscribed forthwith and that did not happen. Therefore, I should be interested in knowing a little more about the decision-making process that has gone on in this case and the extent to which that provides us with lessons about the Hizb ut-Tahrir case. For example, was there a specific request from the Government of Pakistan or perhaps the Government of the United States in support of such a ban? What consideration has been given to whether a ban makes it easier or less easy to disrupt the activities of this group? It seems to me that banning a group under a particular name may simply mean that it re-emerges with a different name or in a different guise or simply disappears off the radar altogether. I would be interested in what considerations are given to such points.
	Finally, it would be helpful if the Minister could give us an indication of the extent to which the guiding factor was this group being a threat in the UK or to British nationals overseas or whether other factors were the final motivation in taking this decision. However, I do not doubt that the Home Secretary has made the right decision in this case.

Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, I support the Motion. I am sure that, now the Minister is in government, she realises how unbelievably difficult these decisions are. The TTP was around when I was Minister for Security. It was extremely difficult to pull together enough information to make certain that one needed to do this because, as the Minister pointed out, this is quite a step to take. One has to weigh up not just what it does to stop it being able to do the dreadful things it wished to do, but how much it might garner support within certain ill-informed parts of our community and abroad. That is very difficult to do.
	My noble friend Lord Reid mentioned HuT. While I was in government, we were continually lambasted about it, but it was very difficult to highlight and pin down specifics to enable us to do this within our law. We must not step forward quickly and do these things. To do that quickly and wrongly is a terrible mistake. My noble friend Lord Reid mentioned that. We have to be very measured and careful. Each time, we have to think about what the effects are within our communities in this country and overseas. Partly in answer to my noble friend Lord Harris, I think that the judgment has to be that if the threat is to our people abroad, not just our civilians but also our servicemen who are out there doing things for our nation, that is just as great an issue as things happening within this country, and all of those issues are an important balance. I support this Motion. These are very difficult issues. They are not at all party political, but are very important for the nation. We have to be very careful, and we need to scrutinise each decision.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My Lords, I broadly concur with what other noble Lords have said in support of this order. I wonder whether the House is aware that over the past decade 60,000 to 70,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, yet not a single successful prosecution has been brought in the Pakistani courts. While proscribing an organisation is indeed an extremely grave and serious matter, one has to live with the reality that if a country that has less than ideal procedures for taking people through due process is unable to take control of these elements of its population, it rests on the rest of us to ensure that our populations are secure and safe.
	I am a little disappointed that it has taken this long to proscribe this organisation, as I know from a great deal of openly available evidence in the Pakistani communities that it has left its signature against some of the most heinous crimes committed in recent years. It has a rather innocent sounding name "the community of the learned students of Pakistan" and sounds entirely inoffensive, but in fact it is armed to the teeth, it has some of the nastiest propaganda at its disposal and it particularly selects people who support human rights to target. The Minister told us of its attacks on the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan, a peaceful, law-abiding, extremely well educated community that provides professionals, such as doctors and others in the most difficult professions, who work across the country to alleviate poverty and hardship. They specifically target this community because they have a warped view of what their religion comprises. In the past two years, they have also taken to targeting journalists and lawyers. I personally know of people in Pakistan who have been sent anonymous letters, whose fax numbers have been obtained and who have been told by this group, "We are watching you, we are going to come and get you". I would have thought there was sufficient evidence to have proscribed them some time ago.
	The Government's statement talks about the possibility of de-proscription and my noble friend mentioned that 46 organisations have been proscribed under these powers. Can she tell us how many have applied for successful deproscription because as a liberal at heart I am very conscious of free expression? It worries me that organisations, once proscribed, would find themselves in that situation and unable to be deproscribed. I wonder if she could tell us how many applications there have been and how many have been successfully de-proscribed. We must recall that freedom's struggles in other parts of the world involve organisations that-due to the exegesis of their operating circumstances-might have been somewhat implicated in some kinds of violence. Yet when they revert to the path of peace, it is also right that we reconsider their standing at that time.
	I hope it is not too wide of this particular order to ask the Minister what steps the Government are taking to train up judges, police officers, forensics teams and so on, so that Pakistan is better equipped to bring people to trial itself rather than waiting for them to be unable to travel to other countries.
	Finally, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, a lot of these organisations are known, the minute they are proscribed, to sail under a new flag. In other words, they find another innocent-sounding name but their aims continue as before and many of the same individuals are involved in the same heinous activities.
	Several noble Lords have made reference to the Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is established perfectly legally in the United Kingdom. I would not therefore draw that analogy as it is an entirely different ball game, but can my noble friend tell us, since it is not clear to me, whether this organisation is established in any sense openly in this country?

Lord Rosser: My Lords, first, I thank the Minister for setting out the background to and the Government's reasons for this order, which is intended to help protect our national security and which we support. I will make a number of points and ask a number of questions, some of which I recognise the Minister may not feel in a position to answer in any detail. Some of the points that I wish to raise have already been made in one form or another by other noble Lords.
	The TTP-the organisation we are discussing today-was set up some three or four years ago, and about a year after that was proscribed by the Pakistani authorities. Last year, the United States took similar action. Are other countries considering similar action and are we pressing other countries to take similar action in respect of this organisation? Proscription-which is based on clear evidence that an organisation is involved in terrorism-means that an organisation is outlawed and is unable to operate in the United Kingdom, with it being a criminal offence to be involved in the activities of the proscribed organisation.
	The TTP has been very active in Pakistan since its formation. Among the factors that the Home Secretary takes into account is the specific threat that an organisation poses to British nationals overseas and the need to support other members of the international community in the fight against terrorism. The Minister said that the TTP had been implicated in attacks in the West, such as the attempted Times Square car bomb attack in May 2010. In very general terms, are there also concerns that the TTP has been, or is likely to be, active in this country? Also in general terms, can the Minister assure the House that there is evidence that previous proscription orders have proved effective in their objective of tackling terrorist activities through disrupting and preventing the organisations concerned achieving their aims?
	There are 46 international terrorist organisations listed under Schedule 2 to the Terrorism Act 2000. As the Minister said, this is the ninth proscription order amending that schedule. The criteria for deciding whether to proscribe an organisation were determined some 10 years ago. Do the Government intend to stick with the current criteria; or do they intend to review or amend them? A proscribed organisation can appeal to an independent committee, and proscribed organisations are currently reviewed annually. Do the Government intend to keep the present arrangements; or are they considering more or less frequent reviews or changes in the appeal mechanism?
	The Minister said that the Home Secretary has exercised her power to proscribe the TTP only after carefully examining all the evidence and information available from a number of sources. I do not doubt that. Bearing in mind that the Prime Minister, when he was leader of the Opposition, gave a commitment to ban another organisation, Hizb ut-Tahrir-when presumably he had not been able to examine carefully all the evidence and information available-can the Minister give an assurance that if the activities of that other organisation or under review, the Home Secretary will make any decision, as she has in the case before us today, only on the basis of the relevant information and evidence available? I repeat: we support the order.

Baroness Neville-Jones: I am extremely grateful to noble Lords who have spoken for the support that they have given to the action that the Government propose to take. I believe, and I hope I am right, that it represents the broad opinion of the House.
	I have been asked a number of questions, to which I shall attempt to respond. In reply to the last question, we will certainly proscribe only on the basis of relevant criteria. I was asked a number of questions about our intentions for proscription in future. If I may, I will leave that largely to next week's Statement. We will continue to conduct a regime that is rigorous in its demand in the circumstances in which an organisation is liable to proscription-that it is related to terrorism. We believe that that is an important line that should be drawn when proscribing organisations.
	The question was asked: why not sooner? Some noble Lords felt that we had taken too long to do this; others felt that we need to take our time when doing something so serious. Of course, the possibility of proscribing the TTP was available to the Government before this Government came into office. I take the view that proscription is a serious action to undertake. I agree with those who said that it is a propaganda coup for the other side if an appeal against governmental action of this kind succeeds and that one needs to be absolutely certain of one's ground. As noble Lords are aware, the grounds are broad terrorism grounds and not others, but it does not just affect the UK, although that is obviously relevant. It also has an affect abroad and on our allies.
	In the end, one cannot seriously distinguish between the effect of terrorist activities abroad and the security of the United Kingdom, as if somehow they represent a threat to this country or to our allies only if they are active in this country. One has to take a view that makes it clear that terrorism is a global phenomenon and that it is extremely interactive in its character.
	I was asked about representations being made to us. Government is a large place and I cannot guarantee that no Government have said anything to United Kingdom Ministers about the TTP. I am not aware of any representations having been made. The decisions of which I am aware were taken on the basis of views within Whitehall and consultation with all relevant departments.
	If an organisation adopts the-perhaps I might say-trick, which has happened, of changing its name and adopting an alias, although it is the same organisation we will do as our predecessors have done, which will be to ban it. The law provides specifically for that and it is right to do so. My noble friend Lady Falkner also asked a number of questions about our experience with this legislation. She is right to say that dealing effectively with terrorism and proscription are not at all the same thing, although I hope and trust that they help each other. Simply banning without acting is by no means the full answer. However, we take the view that outlawing that kind of activity is a powerful political act and that there are circumstances in which that is exactly what we need to do.
	The People's Mujaheddin, an Iranian-related organisation, has been deproscribed. I have to say that it was done under our predecessor Government, but they were not very happy about deproscription and we shared their unhappiness. There was a difference of view between the Government and the independent tribunal that took the view. The difference of opinion probably persists, but it is an example of the fact that the process can be reversed. As I have said, it is illustrative of the importance of being on solid ground before you take the action. I will have to write to the noble Baroness about the extent to which we are engaged in helping to train judges in Pakistan. My belief is that we are active in that area, but I do not have the detail here.
	I believe that other countries are taking action. We, having taken a decision to proscribe, would normally report this to our EU partners, for instance. We will probably take action with other Commonwealth countries and make known our action. Other countries will often factor that sort of mechanism into their own decision-making. We are part of a broader trend.
	Previous orders have been effective. Clearly, one of the things that can happen as a result of proscription-this is a legitimate charge-is driving the organisation further underground. My view is that organisations that get proscribed are not exactly open; their activities are already well concealed and they are not in the public interest. I do not believe that the downside of proscription is damaging. It tells young men-it is usually young men-that they should not go near the organisation. That is important; it sends a broad message. It is just one instrument-but an important one-in our armoury.
	I turn finally to HuT. This organisation was referred to quite properly by a number of noble Lords. We are continuing to watch it. However, as I said, the criterion for proscription is involvement in terrorism, and one has to be very clear if one is going to proscribe an organisation that one is applying the legal criteria correctly. We remain concerned about HuT, and we continue to watch it and to follow its activities closely. The organisation not only operates in this country but has extensive international activities. It is a global organisation, but an important part of it is in the UK.
	Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 4.37 pm.